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Google Patches 30 Chrome Bugs, Adds Instant Pages
JohnBert writes "Google patched 30 vulnerabilities in Chrome, paying out the third-highest bounty total ever for the bugs that outsiders filed with its security team. The company packaged the patches with an update to Chrome 13, adding Instant Pages to the 'stable' channel of the browser. The feature, which Google earlier tucked into Chrome 13 previews, proactively pre-loads some search results to speed up browsing. Google last upgraded Chrome's stable build in early June. Like Mozilla, which this year shifted to a rapid-release schedule, Google produces an update about every six-to-eight weeks. Fourteen of the 30 vulnerabilities patched were rated 'high,' the second-most-serious ranking in Google's four-step scoring system, while nine were pegged 'medium' and the remaining seven were labeled 'low.'"
I thought this was called link prefetching.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The first issue is this is going to play havoc with traffic analytics and tracking. I'm sure Google Analytics will handle Chrome's Instant Pages just fine, but everybody else will have to figure out how to ignore Chrome pre-loads. I did some searching and they are adding a Visibility API to Chrome to allow authors of other traffic reporting packages to handle the difference. Hopefully the Visibility will be pretty straightforward and not require a lot of extra work.
The other issue is that this is going to eat up more hosting bandwidth. Popular websites that appear near the top are going to incur bandwidth usage that may never actually be actively used by the potential visitor.
If the browser starts preloading high ranked pages that I'm not interested in, and do not click on, doesn't that falsely inflate usage statistics on those sites?
Until Chrome finally adds most-recently-used tab order for switching between tabs, there are a lot of people who won't touch it, no matter what other changes you make to the browser.
its when the page doesnt update every fucking time I type in a letter frantically trying to guess what I mean, often with not even funny anymore horseshit
let me type and when I am good and GD ready for the query to be executed then I will hit enter
proactively pre-loads some search results to speed up browsing
God help you if you search for 'child pore cleansing products' with google instant search turned on~
Miller Lite tastes like water that's somehow managed to rot.
Good Lord! Did Google hire away the IE guys from Microsoft or something?
Won't this help you burn through your usage caps in the background?
This is what I mean: I would like to adjust margins on the fly as I can do with Firefox.
Seriously, this is patchnotes or changelog entries, but not "News".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Does not exist for Chrome. I've tried to use Chrome, and loved a bunch of things about it. The tab management is simply not enough for me though. It appears that Google is not allowing access to required functionality, so I went back to Firefox. The second I hear it being available on Chrome, I'm going to use it as my primary browser. (the alternatives so far have(has?) not even come close)
For most users the intuition of "don't click on that link" is the last layer of security between the wild west of the Internet and your computer. Prefetching breaks that barrier, and potentially exposes you to any malware writer that's capable enough and determined enough to get their infected (or pwnd) website into the top search results.
Sorry... although Chrome is decent and maybe more secure than other browsers, until they can promise PERFECT security I don't want to take that chance.
That'll never happen.
If I can survive this far on my company-mandated, outdated IE browser without getting pwnd myself (yet), I think that last layer of security may be the most important one of all.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Google Patches 30 Chrome Bugs, Adds Instant Pages
...adding Instant Pages...
...and this is where I stop using Chrome altogether. Fuck Google. Fuck this "instant"bullshit. They have jumped the shark.
BlogSpot loves showing me ads for Chrome, saying I can drag one tab to the right, and get a split-screen view.
Be nice if it actually started working in Chrome for Mac, someday.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Better hope your skeezy uncle wasn't using your computer when the party van shows up.
Another Chrome version, another failure to provide an option for a persistent bookmark sidebar/pane. Sigh.
Fetching and rendering one level of links/search results is so 2010. I've come up with a much more powerful system, that fetches the entire Inter##ERROR:STACK OVERFLOW##
Fired up chrome this morning on my linux box and it happily told me that I was running an obsolete OS and needed to upgrade.
I run a highly modified version of debian 5.x on that box that I 'm not going to mess with for the sake of running chrome 13.
Time to turn off the automated update check I guess.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
Cr-48, dev channel. Or try the Chrome dev channel. Old features guys...
Enlightenment is a pipe dream. So where's the pipe?
Do you log details of blocked pre-fetches? Do you have data on what portion of blocked pre-fetches were then followed by real visitors? You say "My sites show up plenty fast enough on demand for my visitors, ..." but does that apply well to heavily bandwidth-constrained users? Modems may be old-fashioned, but mobile and wireless users still frequently get poor network performance. Do you have data on how fast all of your visitors download your pages?
You may well have done all the analysis and come up with the best cost-vs-benefit balanced solution, but I would worry about premature optimization in a situation like this. Pre-fetching doesn't exist at random. It solves a real problem and your defeating of the mechanism has real costs which are less obvious to you than they are to some of your visitors.
If you have done this analysis, it would make an interesting read and you should submit it as a /. story.
It's Debian. It's obsolete when it's released.
90 comments so far, and none of the top ones are bashing Google for Chrome's new version number. Have we finally moved past bashing Chrome and Firefox for increasing the major version number every 6 weeks? Please let it be so :)
Just out of curiosity, why would you do that in this day and age? If it makes the user experience better without me having to do anything, I am all for it. I certainly do not want users to think my site noticeably slower than my competitions'. As for bandwidth, server resources and so on.. in 2011, do you even notice this? I have 800,000 hits a month (good sized site, but not huge), and I wouldn't.
I don't care for chrome. I find chrome very unintuitive. I find IE and to a lesser degree FireFox much more intuitive. I use chrome when I want to view videos because it seems faster but otherwise not so much.
Interesting that every highly rated comment seems to go into what this means for the client side, you know, exploits/security, caps, and things like that.
But imagine what impact this could have on the server side...
Each time these millions of Facebook users open their browser to do something, Chrome automatically gets data from facebook.com?