Fun With Google Chrome

OK I know you’ve all downloaded and tried out Google Chrome. If you go to the address bar (Omnibar?) and enter a colon (:) followed by a percent symbol (%)  it will crash as soon as you hit the % key. I couldn’t believe it myself until I tried it. It crashes all the tabs by the way. I was expecting it to only kill the tab where the command was entered.

If I had to guess I’d guess that there is a stack overflow in the search function. It just feels like a recursion thing. I could be wrong of course. I’m also guessing that the Address bar is run by the task that controls the individual tab processes.

I’m sure that is the only flaw in the code though. I mean it is Google after all. So the patch should be out any second now too.

6 Responses to “Fun With Google Chrome”

  1. Mr. T says:

    Latest reports are that they have found and fixed the problem. It was in the url parsing code which makes sense. One can’t test every possibility but I wonder what sort of code review process they have. Code reviews seem not to be in favor these days in too many places. That’s a shame.

  2. Matt says:

    I haven’t tried Chrome myself yet, but it does seem pretty rough around the edges. I like the idea of ‘compartmentalizing’ things so that a crashed element won’t take everything down, though this shows that this system clearly isn’t fully implemented yet. But I’ve had both IE and Firefox crash on me as a result of one page. (At least it’s not as bad as IE in the days of old, which would result in “explorer.exe” dying and my whole desktop thus disappearing.)

  3. Mr. T says:

    IE 8 seems to handle on tab crashing a lot better than IE 7 did. A lot of the stuff in Chrome has been in IE for a while with more in IE8. Not everything but Chrome is not as new as some would have you believe.

    I really am disappointed that Chrome doesn’t support Silverlight BTW. Given how fast sites are adpting it for cool video you’d think they would have supported it.

    I’m also surprised that people think it will take market from IE. All the stuff I have seen so far, and my own intuition, says that it will take from FF first. The FF are the people most likely to try something new.

  4. Matt says:

    I’ve used Silverlight once, and it was on a video you linked to. 😉 Then again, I’m perhaps not the typical web user, either. I don’t know a lot about how Silverlight works — shouldn’t Microsoft be writing a plugin for Chrome, instead of Google trying to write “Silverlight for Chrome?”

    I think you’re absolutely right about Chrome, Firefox, and IE. There are surely plenty of people (like you) who enthusiastically try out new things, but who ended up preferring IE over Firefox. But the majority (almost everyone, actually) of people I know who use IE do so because it’s the default, and it’s something they’re used to.

    In the long-term, Chrome could maybe make progress. Even though it’s seen explosive growth, lots of people have never heard of Firefox. I think the fact that Chrome is made by Google could be a big help. Many people “use the Google” every day, and might thus place some trust in something they make.

    The problem is that, to me, it looks like it was designed to “just work,” something that’s easy-to-use, incredibly stable, and supports anything you throw at it. That’s what might catch the type of people who never even considered using IE.

    But right now, it seems like it’s more the domain of geeks. It’s got stability problems and doesn’t support all that many plug-ins, from what I’ve heard. (Not just you, Mr. T, but lots of reviews.) This is the polar opposite of what it’d take to try to take away the IE market share.

    But then again… In answer to that thought, and to your:
    …but I wonder what sort of code review process they have. Code reviews seem not to be in favor these days in too many places.

    It’s a beta. It’s almost intentionally for geeks and tinkerers. Myriad programs that are today tremendously successful, stable, and user-friendly started off as unstable, user-unfriendly betas. The developers probably aren’t thinking, “Could my grandmother use this?” or, “I wonder what happens if I type :% in as a URL” yet. It’s a prototype, to harness the thousands of users trying weird things that will help them figure out what needs work.

  5. Mr. T says:

    Google made flash work. Why did they leave out Silverlight? (As if I didn’t know.) 🙂

  6. augmegesent says:

    Great blog. I like layout!!!!

Leave a Reply