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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?
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.
Then turn it off.
Sheesh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Won't this help you burn through your usage caps in the background?
You can disable instant searching(for now)
then it pops up on the next computer I use, maybe I want to delete cookies then I have to constantly turn of the fucker, what If I am one of those people who clear cookies every time my browser closed
Sheesh they can handle my documents just fine, I am almost always signed in MAKE IT AN ACCOUNT SETTING, its not that fucking hard, but NO they want to shove it down your throat so its inconvienent to not use it
This is what I mean: I would like to adjust margins on the fly as I can do with Firefox.
I am just going to copy paste this since everyone in slashdot just accepts whatever "features" they want to shove down our thoats and I dont feel like typing it out for a dozen sheep
"then it pops up on the next computer I use, maybe I want to delete cookies then I have to constantly turn of the fucker, what If I am one of those people who clear cookies every time my browser closed
Sheesh they can handle my documents just fine, I am almost always signed in MAKE IT AN ACCOUNT SETTING, its not that fucking hard, but NO they want to shove it down your throat so its inconvenient to not use it"
I am just going to copy paste this since everyone in slashdot just accepts whatever "features" they want to shove down our thoats and I dont feel like typing it out for a dozen sheep
"then it pops up on the next computer I use, maybe I want to delete cookies then I have to constantly turn of the fucker, what If I am one of those people who clear cookies every time my browser closed
Sheesh they can handle my documents just fine, I am almost always signed in MAKE IT AN ACCOUNT SETTING, its not that fucking hard, but NO they want to shove it down your throat so its inconvenient to not use it"
So, what you're saying is that when you're searching for porn and it is recommending non-porn search terms, it isn't helpful? ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Good Lord! Did Google hire away the IE guys from Microsoft or something?
No. If they did the vulns wouldn't be getting patched.
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.
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.
Why do you care if this is built in to Chrome? There are extensions that add this behavior.
You're always signed in, yet clearing cookies and using other people's browsers?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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.
I don't see this because I never use the google.com search page, I use quicksearch instead (Firefox feature since 0.x days).
factor 966971: 966971
Because one shouldn't need to install an extension for such a basic feature?
You must type really slow or something.
In my experience, it only manages to fire off one or two DNS queries before I hit enter, much less load a page. When I am stuck - usually when I'm using it to search my history or the name of a site I can't quite remember - it's always seemed very helpful.
IMHO and YMMV and all that, but for the sake of your health, take a deep breath and calm down :)
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
That's not a reason to not use the browser though. If Chrome is superior except for one feature that can be fixed by an extension that takes 30 seconds to install once at the same time you install the browser, that's a really stupid reason to avoid the browser. Trying to add every single feature that every single person wants (and I don't consider this to be a necessary feature, especially considering there are better ways to switch tabs) just leads to a bloated browser, which Google wanted to avoid.
If you could buy a really great, affordable car, and the car's only downside was crummy factory tires, you buy the car and you put on some tires of your own choosing. You don't go buy a crappy car just because it has nice tires.
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.
um yea firefox just decides to do it once in a while, and 2 its not other peoples, its my computers at home and at work
no, like when I was going to look for a specific electronics part and it brings up doggies, yes google perfect I have never searched for doggies in my entire life but I am constantly ordering diodes, thank you for your great service, it makes goggling for something with my laptop impossible
and yet I have to google "something" just to have the option of shutting it off
Only if you allow google to place a tracking cookie on your system. Contrast this with how DuckDuckGo handles preferences: the cookie that you set contains a string with one flag for each preference setting, and can be added to the URL if you don't want a cookie. If two users have the same preferences, then they have the same cookie / preferences string, and so can't be tracked based on the cookie.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
You can disable it.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
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 :)
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.
Just tried typing DIode into google. Not a single DOggie reference as I typed. In fact ....
D ... Dictionary.reference.com (and several other such) ... Dictionary.reference.com (no change) ... Diocese and a bunch of Catholic sites. ... Diodes .... wikipedia entry on top.
I.
O
D
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.