Google Chrome is Freezing Intermittently With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, Users Say (neowin.net)

Several users who have updated their computers to Windows 10 April 2018 Update are reporting that Chrome is freezing their machines. From a report: I have now used the April 2018 Update for nearly 24 hours and the same problem has presented itself no less than five times. For a machine - which was working perfectly prior to the update - with a Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, I naturally resorted to Reddit and Microsoft forum threads to see if others were experiencing the issue. It appears that several users on Reddit (spotted by Softpedia) with machines sporting varying configurations are experiencing the problem as well, and the only fix to it is the one I found too; that is, putting the laptop to sleep using the power button or closing the lid.

Comments

Yup!

[eggstasy]

And I checked the resource usage, one tab was using 2 gigs of RAM for some reason! ACK!

Re:Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

And I checked the resource usage, one tab was using 2 gigs of RAM for some reason! ACK!

Isn't that normal for Chrome though? It is a resource hog.

Re:Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I switched from firefox to chrome, and now i'm switching back to firefox. What's next, lynx?

Re:Yup!

[93 Escort Wagon]

And I checked the resource usage, one tab was using 2 gigs of RAM for some reason! ACK!

So you're saying you’re not seeing anything out of the ordinary?

Re:Yup!

[Vapula]

People let their browser open longer and longer on the same page, opening more pages...

And many web sites (Facebook to begin with) allocate objects, create circular references and don't break the reference cycle because "dropping" the object, leading to a cycle of objects (elements, functions and closures) which can't be freed by the garbage collect.

Don't blame the browser, blame the web sites creator who don't care about cleaning their junk.

Re:Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I am using Windows 8.1, unpatched since 2015 and everything works fine every single time. Glad I never went in for the amateurishly developed, spyware, adware marketing crap that is Windows 10.

Re:Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

And I checked the resource usage, one tab was using 2 gigs of RAM for some reason! ACK!

So you're saying you’re not seeing anything out of the ordinary?

No. The GP is saying that there is a marked improvement in memory usage.

Re:Yup!

[danomac]

Sounds like Microsoft and Google's telemetry collided and is causing chaos everywhere. The two threads are arguing about who gets to take what.

Re:Yup!

[Kulahan]

Don't blame the browser, blame the web sites creator who don't care about cleaning their junk.

This is only valid if all browsers are experiencing this kind of memory issue. If there's a fix that some browsers refuse to implement, that's on them as well.

Re: Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

Except MS added telemetry to windows 8.1 as well, are you sure you havenâ(TM)t got it

Re:Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the logging of the logging. Both keep logging until one of them gives up.

Re:Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that is funny. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Chrome's memory management when the browser which is well known for memory leaks has better memory management,...

Re:Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

spy vs spy telemetry race condition.

Re:Yup!

[novakyu]

On my Windows 10, a freshly open Google Chrome with a single tab open on Gmail uses half a gig of memory. Yes, there are situations where it's not really Google's fault, but Google is certainly no longer engineering with resource conservation in mind (there are video editing software that can get by on not much more than half a gig of memory!).

Re: Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

For fuck's sake you aren't very bright, are you?

Re:Yup!

[fuzznutz]

Don't blame the browser, blame the web sites creator who don't care about cleaning their junk.

I don't want to know if the site creator cleans his junk or not. That's a problem for his significant other.

Re:Yup!

[Rob Lister]

It's 261mb for me with only gmail open. But does that really matter? FF is bigger hog at 1gb and 5 tabs open. And does that really matter? On my wee old laptop I have 16g and 60% avail. So long as I don't run out I'm good. You?

Re: Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you measuring in megabit. Divide the value by 8 and refer to megabyte.

Re:Yup!

[ArchieBunker]

RAM is there to be used, not bragged about.

Re: Yup!

[Monster_user]

RAM is a expense, expenses must be controlled. The more a web browser takes up, the less of the same resource is available for other tasks.

Whe you only have to budget for one PC with 16GB of RAM, it may not seem like a lot. When you have to budget for hundreds or even thousands of PCs, against a Walmart razor thin margin ecosystem, 16GB is an incredible expense. And one can't raise margins to cover the cost of a better rig, because the lowest bidder wins. This trickles down to the employee who can't afford more than $400 per cycle for a PC, and whose 4GB/dual core box isn't past the 8 year cycle yet.

Excessive memory usage by websites and browsers, and excessive bandwidth usage by websites is both greed and gluttony, and is disrespectful to the working class. Its like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, except in this case that pot of gold is affordable computing. By the time we get 10mbps 4G LTE across the country, the web is going to require 100mbps minimum. Afford 16 GB of RAM, and the minimum is now 64GB.

Re: Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

On my wish list is a PC (laptop or otherwise) with an Atom and 16GB RAM ; or a $100 CPU and 32GB RAM.
The memory only got more expensive, though. They sell computers with a 3GHz Kaby Lake CPU and 4GB RAM. If you buy one such there will be no improvement whatsoever on that 4GB/dual core box you talk of.

Re: Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari

Re:Yup!

[Mal-2]

Allowing the stability of YOUR system to be dependent on remote hosts coding correctly is folly. Even if most sites comply, some won't. A fraction of those may even be malicious. Browsers need to be able to detect when something is going off the rails and kill a thread -- or at least suspend it and ask the user -- because expecting not to encounter intentional abuse is tantamount to wearing a big "pwn me" sign.

Re:Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cállate pinche puto.

Re: Yup!

[Anonymous Coward]

I got Ryzen with 64GB RAM and GTX 1080Ti. It doesn't affraid of anything!

That's the least of it

[JMJimmy]

I switched away from Firefox recently for various reasons and Chrome has been a sore disappointment. Tabs crash constantly, GIFS stop working (shows first frame then goes black), the addon ecosystem is worse than Firefox - there's more of them, just poorly made and option poor.

There's not a single browser on the market today that I would actively recommend. Just an array of mediocrity.

Re:That's the least of it

[93 Escort Wagon]

Tabs crash constantly, GIFS stop working

That second one sounds more like a feature, not a bug.

Re:That's the least of it

[Wolfrider]

--Have you tried Palemoon? It's like Firefox before Australis. Plugins are available as well, and it has a Linux and Mac version.

Re:That's the least of it

[TheGratefulNet]

we're forced to run 'modern' browsers at work, and even on linux and win10, chromium (I won't run chrome, no matter what) freezes at least once a day. usually its the fucking ADS that cause chromium to lock up, but it sure does lock up solid, almost every single day.

my ancient firefox (which does have security issues; it dates at least 3 years ago) works fine, though. I have all my plugins working from years ago, my adblockers, js blocker, etc. I don't get junk with that setup and it stops the 'toxic web' (I should register that phrase, btw) with all the configured filters. I can't configure enough filters on chromium to make browsing safe again.

yeah, the web is horribly ruined, 'webmasters' are the lowest of our programming brothers (phone app makers are tied for being sleaziest, though) and we need good filtering to make the web usable with all the corruption and BS out there.

its funny how people sing the praises of chrome but for me, its a really bad browser.

Re: That's the least of it

[Type44Q]

Firefox+NoScript (on Linux or BSD); accept no substitute.

Re:That's the least of it

[bigman2003]

First, I hate Chrome...and the 'new web' with never ending pages. I am not a genius, but when I've been on Reddit for 30 minutes on a never ending page, I think "God, how much RAM is this thing sucking up right now?"

Obviously that is not really Chrome's fault...but the two go hand in hand. The same B-holes that love never ending pages, have a hard-on for Chrome.

As an aside, the new Reddit update has some problems with my account, and I can't load anything anymore. Good riddance.

Second, not sure what you meant regarding your last comment about Microsoft's best interests- But if I owned Microsoft, I would be pretty happy to screw up Google's crap. Google's actions regarding Windows Phone were pitiful. If you think Google gives one crap about users in the world, you're wrong. They were more than happy to break every attempt to get YouTube on Windows Phone- suing Microsoft for an app that was just a web wrapper...

I think Microsoft should just keep breaking Chrome. Google deserves a kick in their testes.

Re:That's the least of it

[bigman2003]

I agree that the web is 'ruined'. I blame Marketing departments everywhere. I've been a web programmer for a loooong time, and for a long time we were winning the fight of, "No, you can't put huge pictures everywhere! No, the content can't be all videos! No, we can't have ads in 6 places on the website!"

But then Marketing comes in and shows how much more 'engagement' we can get- etc. etc. and the actual user experience goes into the toilet.

Now the marketing people (literally usually college grads on their first job) have been raised with the shit-hole the web has become, and it is normal. No qualms about shoving 3 or 4 more pieces of crap on the webpage.

Now it is better to trick people into signing up for content "give us your email address in order to read the article" than it is to provide good content. Because then they can say they have reached 10,000 new people this month- who will never, ever open, or even see, the emails that come in.

I hate those people.

Re: That's the least of it

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer uMatrix with Pale Moon (the "old" Firefox fork).

Re:That's the least of it

[Serge_Tomiko]

I've really been quite happy with Edge. It still remains far better than Chrome while on battery. I use a VPN for ad blocking, and only need lastpass and evernote extensions. Maybe that's not enough for some, but it's fine for me.

I still have to use Chrome for work as a number of applications don't work with Edge (box.com is a big one), but on my personal surface - Edge is far superior.

Re:That's the least of it

[Dragonslicer]

Now the marketing people (literally usually college grads on their first job) have been raised with the shit-hole the web has become, and it is normal. No qualms about shoving 3 or 4 more pieces of crap on the webpage.

Now? I think you're completely forgetting MySpace and Geocities.

Re:That's the least of it

[thegarbz]

When you start having a problem with all your software, maybe it's time to start looking at the platform on which its running.

Shit last time I saw a Chrome tab crash was back when flash was still a thing, and the tab was only brought down by the flash plugin. Firefox is equally stable these days, though it got hairy for a while.

By the way I'm not sure what you're talking about "ecosystems" for. It's a fucking browser. Throw in an add blocker, and browse the web. If you want an OS then browse the web using emacs.

Re:That's the least of it

[thegarbz]

we're forced to run 'modern' browsers at work

Ha suckit! I run IE9 at my work.

Re: That's the least of it

[scdeimos]

I prefer Firefox+NoScript+Privoxy myself.

Re:That's the least of it

[JMJimmy]

The platform on which it's running had no crash problems in Firefox. Firefox was actually remarkably stable & fast - it just suffers from "designer" syndrome. The users needs are put last while the designers do whatever the fuck the trend is this week.

As to ecosystems - there was an entire suite of web development tools I used which was obliterated and only a fraction of the functionality was replaced by a Mozilla version. IRC, SSH, FTP, SQLite, etc were all great extensions that were wiped out by FF57. That doesn't include the interface improvements which allowed in browser sorting/filtering/searching/exporting of tabled data, right click->mass open/save/copy of links, etc.

Re:That's the least of it

[UnknownSoldier]

I would also add animated gifs to "Things that suck about the Web"

(Gee, thanks for sucking up 5+ MB of bandwidth. There is a reason we have a dedicated MOVIE format such as .mp4.)

> Now it is better to trick people into signing up for content "give us your email address

I noticed that everyone is going heavy into tracking. Recently I received an email from InVision talking about Walmart's redesigned website.

Now instead of a _simple_ URL:

https://www.invisionapp.com/bl...

They link to some crap like this:

https://www.invisionapp.com/#/...

Fuck off with your tracking.

Re:That's the least of it

[JMJimmy]

Palemoon/Watermoon are great but now that they've diverged from the main FF line they're most likely to become security problems or be forced to make the same switch to "Quantum". A temporary solution at best

Re:That's the least of it

[JMJimmy]

It's a known, rare Chrome bug with certain Intel HD drivers. The only "easy" way to fix it is to disable/renable the driver. Probably related to hardware acceleration and gifv

Re:That's the least of it

[piers_downunder]

I've had the same problems with playing GIFs and pages hanging in Chrome. The most common cause of this is a dodgy add-on. Try disabling add-ons and restarting Chrome. If it works, then you can re-enable your add-ons one by one to find the guilty culprit. Another quick way to determine if Chrome is really the culprit is to do a Ctrl-Shift-N and load the page incognito. IME, Chrome is rarely the cause of the problem.

Re: That's the least of it

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 obvious troll. Edge is garbage, it can't even close without a huge lag 40% of the time, on a fresh install no less.

I have customers bring computers into my shop all the time because "the computer is freezing" and the entire issue is edge, swapping them to anything else makes them happy and I don't get returns for the "issue"

Plus, how do you reset it when it breaks? PowerShell hacks? Fuck that garbage, just rip it out

Re: That's the least of it

[Anonymous Coward]

Decentraleyes ftw!

Re:That's the least of it

[Waccoon]

The massive, aggressive shift away from documents to full-blown "apps" is why I quite web development entirely.

I remember when everyone was screaming about standards compliance and usability when MS was in charge. Then Chrome took over and NOW everyone is perfectly okay with pretty and shiny and developing for name-brand browsers only.

I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[Killall -9 Bash]

.... that the problem has something to do with hardware acceleration, the endless fountain of browser glitches.

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[Vapula]

Function A creates an element B and associate a function C to the "onclick" property of B before linking B to the DOM tree

C being created inside A, it inherits the closure of A in which you find a variable pointing to B

We have DOM -> B -> C -> closure -> B cycle created

When B is removed from DOM, the references loop still stays, every object keeps at least one reference to it and can't be freed by the garbage collect.

Propre way to do it is to clear the onclick of B when you remove it from the DOM to break the cycle... but most web sites don't care and this leads to browsers memory usage growing and growing.

Re: I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[Anonymous Coward]

Also the event canâ(TM)t be cleared if it is an anonymous function. It has to be assigned to a variable in the closure, along with a function to remove it.

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[squiggleslash]

And guess what encourages this antipattern? jQuery. And guess what virtually every website on the Internet uses these days for virtually everything? jQuery.

Not that I'm saying jQuery isn't a godsend, it is, but you really wish the thing had been designed in a way that doesn't encourage closures for everything.

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[TFlan91]

Sounds like a simple solution then.

Extend that too easy to use ".remove()" jQuery method to remove event handlers too.

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[munch117]

Any tracing garbage collector will trivially collect cycles. What's so special about the DOM or JS that it can't be properly garbage-collected?

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. jQuery is fine. It's all the HTML5 ads and third-party tools embedded into the page that cause problems.

You have 200+ requests to load a page from 100 different servers, which means 100 different DNS requests and TCP/IP connections to establish. All of that drags down 5MB of HTML, CSS, and Javascript and takes 60+ seconds to load over broadband. Half of those bits are in some RequireJS, React, Angular, or similar crappy framework that should not exist. Also, half of the ads and third-party garbage that is loaded periodically send heartbeat messages back to their masters, resulting in hundreds to thousands of additional AJAX requests over the lifetime of the page (depending on how long the page is left open). There are also also a half-dozen trackers on every page because one tracker wasn't good enough.

All of these things inject crap into the DOM, which slows down the whole page. The browser ends up using a constant 2-5% CPU to accommodate the page. Get enough pages loaded and that easily totals several gigabytes of RAM and 100% CPU. The only solution is to install software (usually a plugin like Ghostery) that blocks the third-party requests from leaving the browser in the first place. If the page works fine without the extra web requests, then the requests shouldn't exist in the first place.

I prefer to visit websites where the operators respect the fact that I don't want my system resources to be abused.

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[cowwoc2001]

That's not how garbage collection works. Look up "mark and sweep" to see what I mean. Garbage collectors (at least decent ones) are designed to collect cycles so long as none of the nodes are "strongly reachable" (borrowing a phrase from Java... not sure if the same terminology applies to the browser).

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[Anonymous Coward]

Fun fact, one of the workarounds I've done is disable acceleration because it kept crashing on sites. Imgur for example but even Slashdot on comment submission. No stack trace, nothing just "aww snap". Great, thanks Google. You can see them in chrome://flags

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[KlomDark]

No, not jQuery.

Blame the newfangled Single Page App (SPA) frameworks like Angular - that's where this nonsense comes from.

Most SPA sites don't even use jQuery anymore. So you're going to have to target your anger towards something newer.

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[KlomDark]

Exactly!

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[thegarbz]

Propre way to do it is to clear the onclick of B when you remove it from the DOM

The proper way is to not have so many subs in the employ of one dom to begin with. They can't all be getting the attention they deserve. Get more doms, split them up and put them in separate rooms. It's an adult entertainment venue not a slave house.

Re: I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[Bing Tsher E]

Topping sucks. It's a hell of a lot of work. The subs just want to lie there like babies and have things happen to them.

Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts....

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Firefox on Linux is great. Nothing is accelerated, so you have no issue, except when running out of RAM or CPU.

So, logic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows changes and not chrome, and suddenly Chrome freezes Windows? All the faulty logic aside, it's a pretty good showcase of how shitty an OS is when an application manages to crash it. Get Windows, and prepare to party like in 1993.

Re:So, logic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, chrome did this to me years ago when my virus program upgraded. computer could not boot up at all and i had to un-install it in safe mode. Like magic computer booted up fine. I have avoided chrome ever since and have never had an issue like that with any other browser.

Chrome likes to have fun with your OS. So no wonder it potentially can have fits when the OS upgrades.

Logic dictates one should avoid Chrome.

Re: So, logic?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it wouldn't boot, how did you use safe mode?

Re: So, logic?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it wouldn't boot, how did you use safe mode?

Idiot.

Re: So, logic?

[Anonymous Coward]

he used the operating system's safe mode, you ignorant clod

Re:So, logic?

[KlomDark]

I've been experiencing the same thing on Mint Linux. Runs for a while and then full lockup. So it's not just Windows.

Re: So, logic?

[Bing Tsher E]

Chrome isn't crashing Windows. Chrome is crashing and Windows is sweeping the wreckage out of memory like it should.

Has Google been hiring Windows developers from Apple?

Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be the first time a microsoft update has caused problems for a rival's products or programs.

Because this would be the first ever recorded such instances I deem it to be highly unlikely.

...so nothing to see here.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not the OS's job to make sure programs for it are going to work. That would be the developers of the program.

Re:Nothing to see here

[DontBeAMoran]

Program used to work fine, Microsoft updates OS, program suddenly crashes?

How is that the program developers' fault?

Re:Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

Re: Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they had access to early releases of the update? YOU FUCKING MORON

Re:Nothing to see here

[Vapula]

isn't it the job of the OS to make sure that an individual program can't freeze the whole system ?

Re:Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

MS: To do X, call functionX with parameter A,B,C.

Dev: functionX is too slow, we'll just hack the function table directly.

MS: We fixed the issue with the function table that causes it to lock up under specific circumstances.

Dev: MS BROKE OUR SOFTWARE!

Re:Nothing to see here

[sconeu]

The modern verision of "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" is
"Window's isn't done until Chrome doesn't run"

Re:Nothing to see here

[ilsaloving]

Well, if this was Apple instead of Microsoft, the answer would be, "Yeah, and? We updated the OS. It's not our fault if you can't keep up." They do it all the time, the most recent one being the whole DisplayLink fiasco.

Microsoft, however, goes out of it's way to maintain backward compatibility. To the point that they will even recreate bugs in older versions of the OS that applications happen (rightly or wrongly) to depend on. So when something like this happens, it's reasonable for eyebrows to be raised.

Re:Nothing to see here

[DontBeAMoran]

Ah, I understand now. Thank you.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey moderators, wake up! Just as many people in this thread have pointed to how Microsoft has a history of breaking competitors' working software when new O/S versions come out, the above commenter points to a very well-known aphorism from 30 years ago. It is particularly on-point in the current thread.

Sounds like a feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether it's a feature for MS or the users is debatable.

Graphics Driver

[nanospook]

This post is without real basis, but I use Opera and it was having graphical issues after the update. I rolled back the driver (or tried too) and it then restore it and all was well.

Re:Graphics Driver

[nanospook]

My post is without real basis I mean..

Re:Graphics Driver

[darkain]

I'll add to this. One of the two updates last year had a major incompatibility with AMD drivers. AMD acknowledged this problem being with their drivers themselves. What did they do? Literally took SIX MONTHS to fix the issue. Major games such as Overwatch would randomly crash mid-game within 1-10 minutes of game play (great for a game that literally penalizes you for leaving mid-game). The AMD driver bug also caused issues with Discord, such as massive load times for the app and instabilities with the app. Gaming is one thing, work is another. These driver issues also caused massive stability issues with Photoshop, preventing me from doing major parts of my day-job. I was forced to replace my AMD video card with an nVidia one. The only other option was to revert the entire OS to a previous build (massive undertaking and downtime), because there was no compatible AMD driver that had the fix. If you ran the older build of Windows, you could downgrade to an older and stable driver. Pulling the video card and putting in a nVidia card solved everything instantly.

Re:Graphics Driver

[Anonymous Coward]

t. Team Green shill

Re:Graphics Driver

[Anonymous Coward]

One, link to this alleged bug pls.

Two, if you're depending on your system for your day-job, you should use a card/driver that is suitable for it. You were using one of the workstation line of graphics cards, right?

Re:Graphics Driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Three, your day job is likely to spam mailing lists and IRC and customer support etc. : This works on my machine.

I bet this bug wouldn't have happened if using an AMD graphics card that differed by a half generation.
I recommend the guy you're assaulting to run memtest86 or memtest86+, anyway.

But still you're a big fucking idiot.

"One, my house never blew up due to a gas leak"

"Two, if you're depending on your house to not get killed, you should use a housing accommodation that is suitable for it. You were living as a permanent resident in a hotel, right?"

Re:Graphics Driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Another stupid wanker who can dish it out but not take it.

Of course making sure your hardware is OK is step one.

You have very, very low standards for "assault", sensitive ego much?
Your house are built to standards, standards which are set to make it fit for living - unless you're hailing from some hut out in the sticks.

Same thing with gaming cards compared to workstation cards. Gaming cards are meant for gaming and general use. If your day-job and living is depending on your hardware, you're an idiot if you totally rely on gaming class hardware. There are reasons workstation class hardware and their drivers goes through tons of extra certification, validation, is made of better silicon and cost more.

If you gamble your source of income by using gaming components and cheaping out of support, you are a moron and deserve everything that comes to you.

Windows updating too fast to be stable

[xack]

This is why enterprises and power users are staying with LTSB, Windows 7 and even XP. We don't want sudden updates breaking our stuff. Microsoft needs to learn to slow down and do proper tetsing instead of this Windows as a service fad.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Killall -9 Bash]

More like beta testing as a service. (BTaaS). Blame Google for popularizing that shit.... (and also blame Microsoft for copying every bad idea Google's had for the last 15 years)

The quality of testing has increased dramatically since Aperture made employee testing mandatory.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why enterprises and power users are staying with LTSB, Windows 7 and even XP.

Not sure if you can call anybody using Windows XP in this day and age a "power user"...there's nothing intelligent about putting that on the Internet.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash for marketing victims.

There is nothing "power" in insisting on using the latest products all the time. It's called "being a guinea pig", or perhaps being a "useful idiot". Further, nobody claimed these XP systems up for the debate are on the Internet. That part was your own invention. But thanks for playing.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[desdinova 216]

I think his point is more based on the fact that XP is not getting any security updates

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[iampiti]

Exactly. An OS is supposed to be stable. Please stop making changes to it all the freaking time.
The agile development process doesn't belong in an OS. Alas, at this point a change in direction for Windows seems very unlikely so it will have to be use something else or put up with this stupidity

Re: Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Anonymous Coward]

And? As we see with 10, it's getting updates and it's still fucked.

If you practice proper security on your network, it shouldn't matter.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Serge_Tomiko]

No one can be a power user running Windows XP. Come on, get a grip.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Anonymous Coward]

At this point, it might be less work to run XP and maybe not get owned by some random hacker VS run Windows 10 and guarantee that you Microsoft will break something with ever update.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has beta testing channels and also a separate release for testing new features. Blame M$ for their perpetually ever worsening OS.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[thegarbz]

This is why enterprises and power users are staying with LTSB

So to be clear you're saying this is why enterprises are using the system built specifically for enterprises? And that this bug in software not intended for enterprises and interacting with software on a rolling release that shouldn't be used by enterprises is somehow supposed to be alarming to MS?

Can we get a +5 "Well Duh" mod please?

Also you don't need to be on LTSB. Switch to the semi-annual release instead of the targeted one like a normal person, all this shit is sorted out before it gets rolled out to you. No need for some magical LTSB version that you can only access if you are an enterprise customer.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a grip yourself kid.

Being a "poweruser" has nothing to do with which version of Windows you're using. It's like arguing that you can't be a damned good driver unless you're driving some brand new, expensive and unreliable car. It's not what you have, but how you use it. E.g, being a Windows 10 user doesn't make you a power user. Sorry, you wasted your money. However, if you for instance are writing and using scripts to automate your daily tasks, you're very likely a power user.

Re: Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Bing Tsher E]

Actually, there are FPGA design suites that have not, and probably never will, be upgraded tonrun on Windows 10. Not the latest dev tools, but those for some of the older gate arrays.

I would dare any dink keyboard jockey or 'web programmer' running Redmond's-greatest to claim that a developer who slings Verilog or VHDL is not a power user.

Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Anonymous Coward]

Eff you, you make it very tempting to install Windows XP x64 on a desktop. It would be such a beautiful, really fast OS.

Re: Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Brockmire]

I think you have limited experience in OS's. Most modern linux distros have 6 month releases. The ones that don't, are considered stable but not current. Most of stability issues are driver or CPU patch related, not OS. Me, personally, have never had to roll back a bad windows OS upgrade but I have had to rollback and freeze kernels on Linux VPS's I have.

Re: Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Brockmire]

I disagree. I know a very smart FPGA developer. He can setup AND understand some complex FPGA debug that's beyond my level, but I can set a static IP on my computer and he can't. If your family doesn't call you for computer advice, you probably aren't a power user, IMO.

Re: Windows updating too fast to be stable

[Bing Tsher E]

Nine year olds can figure out how to set up a static IP on their computer by watching a half hour of youtube videos.

It takes considerably more effort to learn to be an FPGA developer. In fact, to actually use the power of a computer, without just using it for entertainment, is an elusive goal.

Spy machine glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of when various things hint towards spy activity..... Windows used to only support 1 program reading a webcam but that was too easily foiling spyware. So they patched it so that any number of programs can open the camera, so now you can't "be sure" when you do it yourself. I never heard anyone asking for that "feature" either.

Now I'm far more suspicious that this is something similar. When an OS patch borks a browser, it reeks of some kind of underhanded spy behavior. Such as hot-patching memory under the browser in ram, but they got it slightly wrong causing it to run-away and crash the OS. Almost as if the browser activity is directly being watched by some low-level kernel mode code that wraps up user activity in "telemetry packets". But now that code has a boo-boo and brings down the whole machine, outing the fact that browser activity is crossing userspace-kernelspace borders which is almost indicative of spying.

As each day passes I wonder what the NSA has forced microsoft to do today......

Re: Spy machine glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

The other change they made to the video handling was to allow software to work directly with a compressed stream from the camera, for those cameras that support it. This was to reduce CPU use by avoiding having to compress the video on the fly before streaming it out, for say a video chat or spying. General consensus at the time was this could only be of benefit to spyware, as a CPU spike may alert the user that their video was being exfiltrated.

Re: Spy machine glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like I didn't remember the issue correctly, sorry.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/08/22/has-microsoft-broken-millions-of-webcams-and-how-to-fix-yours/

Re: Spy machine glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

This might have to do with video chatting on a fucking smartphone don't you think.

Re: Spy machine glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the link dickhead.

Any relation to recent Firefox update?

[Anonymous Coward]

FF pushed an update yesterday for an issue they discovered with old code that was causing a problem with Windows 1803 but not previous versions. Does Chrome have it too?

chrome only has 1 use

[Anonymous Coward]

On a raspberry pi firefox doesn't seem to do audio hardware acceleration right so anything you are watching streaming like youtube or movie/tv sites you just get a loud static noise. Chrome however handles audio hardware acceleration beautifully and it is a ton of fun watching shows at 720p on such a tiny little 35$ machine.

Aside from this singular use case though, it is piss poor with having options to automatically remove your history upon exit (something baked into firefox). Everything requires some kind of add-on because they don't have an about::config type dealio. I know the damned thing spies on me for that obese coont of a corporation alphabet. You cannot drag and drop bookmarks, and while speed tests say it is faster I have never found this to actually be the case.

As a nodejs developer chromes inability to do webGL properly until just very recently was pretty pathetic, and their inability to properly read/parse CSS is just awful. They also seem to have some kind of severe bug up their ass about how everyone configures their SSL certs, most likely because google is trying to sell them.

Overall, it's got like 1 point for it, and about 10 against it.

Not only Chrome

[denisbergeron]

I install the new update yesterday, make the mandatory 5 reboots. This morning, the window's login screen was freezing for a good 5 minutes...

Then when I finally get there, windows ask me to change my login credential... and freeze... then updating language module and freeze.. adding I don't know how many new keyboard in the keyboard bar....

When, we compare this to mature OS like Ubuntu or Mint... Windows take like 3 hours to update on my i5 12g ram 10krpm computer after the download... without counting the reboots... Ubuntu ou Mint can date like 15 minutes on the same hardware..

Windows is not ready for business ... ;-)

Re:Not only Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Update to 1803 (phase after reboot) took me 10 minutes on a 7th gen i5 with an ssd and 8gb ram. Super smooth.

Re:Not only Chrome

[AmiMoJo]

Welcome to 2018. This is how we test software now.

Why bother testing all the popular bits of software on numerous hardware configurations when you can just do a gradual roll out and wait for users to do your QA for you? Rather than employ people to find bugs, just load the OS up with telemetry.

Everyone does it. Android and iOS app updates are rolled out slowly, and you can cancel the roll out via the dashboard if you notice abnormally high numbers of crashes.

Re:Not only Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows update is probably the saddest part of a thoroughly mediocre OS. Just imagine if anyone tried to market a Linux distribution with a package management system as slow, unreliable and broken as Windows update. Imagine the howls of laughter if anyone had insisted on such a system deserving a 90% market share.

The Stockholm syndrome is real.

Re:Not only Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

well if anyone is actually able to make a linux desktop distro that is FULLY USUABLE FOR WINDOWS USERS it would completely push MS out of the enterprise market.

Yet, what do we have? A bunch of really great distros that... aren't ready for business, or prime-time, or enterprise. Back end? obviously. the back end is 5% of the market. The desktop is the rest, and linux has failed at every attempt to corner that market. Arguably getting close, but how? By dumbing it down to windows levels.

Trust me here, having to struggle to actually secure our servers with 2012 or 2016 on them, WSUS that is effectively useless as win10 just fucking dual scans both your designated sus AND the internet and basically says "fuck your policies". The desktop os flagrantly disregards user settings like deferred updates or even blocked updates.

It has become a fucking NIGHTMARE to administer windows in an enterprise environment and each new "beta feature" they force fuck onto my systems makes it harder. do you not think we'd be pure redhat or centos if that was a viable option? It's not.

Anyhoo.... this issue here is also affecting machines without chrome installed, and causing the same issues people blame on chrome, in firefox AND edge. It's another "feature" update the fucks over half of the systems it touches. i'm still down a harddrive thanks to 1709 fucking my raid out the window THEN decided to make my raid array the boot drive.

I've been administering windows environments since the 2k days, this shit is getting really bad and Apple isn't going to pick up the pieces, please for the love of god can someone code a linux distro we can use across the board.

Re:Not only Chrome

[PmanAce]

I had no problems as well, only one reboot. Maybe you are holding it wrong?

Re:Not only Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

i5 12g ram 10krpm

Driver or memory issues. The 5 reboots might suggest that there was lots of driver updates. Also how reliable are those WD Raptors these days?

Re:Not only Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

10 minutes on a 6th gen i5 with an ssd and 16 gb ram. Super smooth as well.

Re:Not only Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Software testing as a role or individuals responsibility mostly died out in ~2015 in Microsoft (https://testastic.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/in-pursuit-of-quality-shifting-the-program-manager-mindset/ ). Most of those who remained moved into data scientist roles, which is just what you said. The rest of the testing has move towards automation since developers want to develop code, not do manual tests.

Considering that MS has basically said Windows Azure now a days, is it shocking that the development teams would spend more time trying to push code out rather than test the system works correctly?

Re:Not only Chrome

[thegarbz]

Windows is not ready for business ... ;-)

To be fair to Windows if your business is using the new update then it is doing so against MS's own recommendation and doesn't deserve to be called a business as much as a zoo, because only an actual monkey would be running the targeted release branch instead of staying on the semi-annual channel.

Why do you voluntarily beta test in a business setting?

Re:Not only Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

I fully understand your frustration, but I beg to differ.

First of all, no, it wouldn't push out Microsoft. There are way to much people who are far too invested (both in monetary and emotional terms) with Microsoft for that to happen.

Second, to fit your criteria I'd suggest looking into (open)SuSE. IMO it's the most stable and Enterprise-ready distribution you'll find out there. I'd strongly suggest looking into it to see if it can do what you need.

Third though, is the most important, because it all depends on what you mean with "fully usable for windows users". If you're looking for a 1:1 copy of Windows that can do Windows things perfectly, with a nice gui 100% of the way, no learning required, all applications preserved - forget about it, that's a fantasy. Yast can help you quite a bit with the admining stuff, even if some editing might be necessary or preferable now and then. Again though, IMO, there is something to be said for just editing simple text-files in well known locations when you need to change something rather than digging around in some obscure dialogue window found on some tab in an opaque GUI. Yes, AD, that would be you.

The fundamental thing though is that Linux isn't Windows, and it does things differently. That doesn't mean you can't accomplish the same things necessarily, but that you go about it in different ways, e.g you don't use AD, but have to implement LDAP, Kerberos, SAMBA, DNS and all that jazz yourself - neither which should be any real problem if you actually know what you're doing. If you're up to it, you can even make it compatible with Windows clients.

The result is that it takes a bit longer to get things running the first time, especially if you're a bit inexperienced, but on the other hand, you back up your config files and then you rarely ever have to touch them again.

All IMO, IME, YMMV etc.

Re:Not only Chrome

[citylivin]

"Windows take like 3 hours to update on my i5 12g ram 10krpm"

Well i do not disagree with your thesis (windows 10 sucks), you do have a rotational hard drive. I ran 15k hard drives but dropped them almost a decade ago for a crucial m4 that performed circles around it.

Get a samsung drive. They dont fail. Ive deployed hundreds at this point and just had my first failure on a drive a deployed in 2013. And even that I am not sure if its the actual hard drive that has failed because its working fine for me on the bench during stress testing.

There is simply zero reason to use a rotational drive in 2018. Your lag is probably caused by your slow ass drive, sorry to say..

m.2 drives thats another story though. Already had a few fail due to heat mostly and all bets are off on other manufacturers that are not samsung. Stay away from intel, plextor and adata ssds.. had problems with those too.

Re:Not only Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

In MS world, Windows 10 is somewhat unique. They released anniversary update, creators update, etc (Windows 10 version history). And somewhere in between they released some OS component (let say .net framework 4.7) that doesn't work with previous update. You might say, well some OS component doesn't work on previous update is normal. Well.. the interesting part is the said component works fine on Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2 (.net framework 4.7.1 offline installer).

TL;DR: Windows 10 stability is a joke, even compared to Windows 8.1, that should say something.

Re:Not only Chrome

[antdude]

Yep, QA isn't important these days. Companies got cheap. :(

Re:Not only Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft seems to have lost any interest of functional keyboards. On every major Win10 update to my work PC, the keyboard layout is changed from my local one and typically the settings page is also randomized to a new location. For the past 20 years of professional coding career, the keyboard layout was selected exactly once when Windows was installed and it could be left there. The keyboard just worked. But Windows 10 seems to be on a crusade against keyboards.

Windows ain't done till Chrome don't run

[Steve1952]

Wait, sounds familiar somehow...

What did you expect

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, sure, you've got a powerful machine. It has lots of RAM, an SSD, and a phat network connection. But with Windows phoning home to Microsoft with all your info, and Chrome doing the same thing for Google of course it's going to slow down. And, of course, Microsoft is going to give their own info collection services priority over Google.

People still use Chrome?

[sremick]

Yes, flamebait subject. But hear me out... given the growing interest in data privacy and concern about the mining of our online activities, Chrome's horrendous tendency to take over all your computers' RAM and CPU, the latest Firefox being measurably faster than Chrome, aggressive and intrusive bundling of trojan Chrome installs into unrelated apps, and now Chrome pulling an IE in pushing proprietary markup that encourages the making of websites that ONLY work in Chrome, why are people still giving Google a pass and using an inferior/arrogant browser when there is a better option?

Re: People still use Chrome?

[Type44Q]

People still use Chrome?

Generally not the smart ones, no... however, my myriad detractors will no doubt take great pleasure hearing that that's exactly what browser I'm typing this with - don't ask.

Re:People still use Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about because the quality of Firefox's recent releases has been greatly exaggerated by fanboys? It's still dog slow to load the home page with no plugins active, and feels slower than Chrome for general browsing.

Re: People still use Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Safari.

Re:People still use Chrome?

[ilsaloving]

The worst part is that Chrome has now taken the lead in browser market share by a wide margin.

This is IE6 all over again, cause Google is pushing all their proprietary crap (like AMP), which benefits no one but themselves.

Re: People still use Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

We did this to ourselves. When chrome came out originally all of us geeks bragged about it and recommended it to all of our family and friends.

Re:People still use Chrome?

[antdude]

People care not. :( Renenber when people loved IE? And then Firefox?

Now they can brag Edge is better than Chrome

[bettodavis]

And be truthful with their spam.

Because Chrome was made objectively worse.

Shared Blame?

[Voyager529]

Full disclosure, I'm not the biggest Chrome fan, and not the biggest Google fan, either. However, I don't generally get caught up in browser wars; I don't generally tell Chrome users to use other browsers if they're happy with it and their sites load.

However, about a month ago, Chrome started acting really weird. Sites would time out, or take over a minute to load, on well-spec'd computers with no malware and wired network connections. After trying every tweak I could think of, I tried those same sites in Firefox and they loaded in the 2-3 seconds they were supposed to. Over the past month, that experience has repeated itself across users with nothing in common except Chrome, and "switching to Firefox" completely resolving their issues.

I'm sure the April update sucks; I'm hard pressed to point to a Win10 feature update that provided a useful feature that justified the update installation time. However, I'm hard pressed to not give Google at least some share of the blame when a number of users (some of which still using Windows 7) had issues with Chrome that were solved by switching to Firefox.

Re:Shared Blame?

[Anonymous Coward]

I shared many of the chrome issues that had popped up over the last "few" months to the point that I installed FF again after the great dev extension exodus and swore to uphold and defend. But having made the desperate transition back to FF I must say it fucking blows chrome out of the water for speed, mem and cpu usage. It's the diff between day and night. I haven't had my FF browser lock up once. No more video jitters/tearing/chopping whilst a game is running minimised either.

Opposite problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone is saying they switched to Firefox because Chrome was having issues for them.
Well, I've had the opposite problem, ever since Firefox moved to multi-process architecture, my Firefox kept hanging all the time, while Chrome would work fine. Annoying, but I haven't experienced the issue mention in the article with my Chrome at least.

Reddit is not a TechSupport forum

[Chronus1326]

You posted in Reddit - enough said. Reddit is not a respectable forum, the fact that you posted there, before here, shows how inept you are.

Wait for it

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait for the pop up that says, Chrome freezing? Better try Edge which won't freeze on you.

Chain of Crash [Re:That's the least of it]

[Tablizer]

There's not a single browser on the market today that I would actively recommend.

At least we have backup choices. If Chrome crashes, we have Edge. If Edge crashes, we have FireFox. If FireFox crashes, we have PaleMoon. If PaleMoon crashes, we have Lynx. If Lynx crashes, we have Emacs. (Emacs has a browser, doesn't it? It has everything else.)

Extra points if you rework "Dem Bones" song for this.

Re:Chain of Crash [Re:That's the least of it]

[Curunir_wolf]

Surprised that no one has mentioned Brave. Fast, functional, and built-in ad and tracker blocking.

Re: Chain of Crash [Re:That's the least of it]

[Anonymous Coward]

And Brave is based on Chromium engine, sans any references back to Google.

Re:Chain of Crash [Re:That's the least of it]

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe, them bones are me
Some say, we're born into the grave

I feel so alone, gonna end up a big ole pile of them Firefox bones

Dust rise, right on over my time
Empty, fossil of the new scene

I feel so alone, gonna end up a big ole pile of them Seamonkey bones

Toll due, bad dream come true
I lie, dead gone under red sky

I feel so alone, gonna end up a big ole pile of them...
I feel so alone, gonna end up a big ole pile of them...
I feel so alone, gonna end up a big ole pile of them Pale Moon bones

Re:Chain of Crash [Re:That's the least of it]

[Tuidjy]

There's not a single browser on the market today that I would actively recommend.

If Lynx crashes, we have Emacs. (Emacs has a browser, doesn't it? It has everything else.)

Extra points if you rework "Dem Bones" song for this.

Of course, Emacs has browsers.

It has had text browsers for more than a decade... and for the last few years, one has been able to watch YouTube, if one wishes.

To be honest, I only browse text heavy sites in Emacs, like Slashdot, Wkipedia, Oracle's Java specs, MSDN, etc. but for those, I actually strongly recommend it. You were joking with 'If Lynx crashes', but if you weren't I'd still recommend Emacs's EWW before Lynx. Easy to search, fully programmable, and intimately familiar, if you have been using Emacs for half a century (I know, I know, it only feels like it)

If you use Emacs for text editing a lot, as I do, it's a no-brainer. Emacs is the Swiss Army Knife of editors... if the Swiss Army Knife had attachments for a satellite phone, water purification, Sudoku puzzle generation... and of a course wheelbarrow handles and wheel.

Re:Chain of Crash [Re:That's the least of it]

[Tablizer]

I was thinking more of this part:

Toe bone connected to the foot bone
Foot bone connected to the heel bone
Heel bone connected to the ankle bone
Ankle bone connected to the shin bone
Shin bone connected to the knee bone
Knee bone connected to the thigh bone
Thigh bone connected to the hip bone ...

Example:

If Chrome crashes I use Edge then
If Edge crashes I use FireFox then
If Firefox crashes I use BlueMoon then...

So What? The Users Are Two Time Losers

[Anonymous Coward]

They shouldn't be using Chrome nor Windows 10.

Opera is pretty good

[Anonymous Coward]

There's not a single browser on the market today that I would actively recommend. Just an array of mediocrity.

I revisited Opera recently after dismissing it years ago, and it is pretty good these days. Not perfect (it doesn't handle streaming video very well; I end up flipping back to firefox for that, but great for everything else), but more stable and secure than the other browsers I've tried, and supports a number of sites that break on chrome in various ways fwiw.

Re: Opera is pretty good

[Bing Tsher E]

I am pretty satisfied with Opera on Android. It is the only browser on Android that I know of that you can force zoom to be enabled and it rewraps the resized text to be justified to your screen size. That is a very powerful feature.

Re: Opera is pretty good

[Anonymous Coward]

Lighting does that too. Plus you can get it on f-droid.

Check dwm.exe

[Anonymous Coward]

Fixed a similar issue just yesterday. Using Windows 10 Pro 1709, I had a 2 month issue with a command-prompt application (NOT using graphics API, just C++ stdlib) rendering the OS unresponsive after about 20 minutes even though I could tell that the application seemed to be running just fine. The dwm.exe and a host process pegged the 3D graph for GPU0 (Intel HD 4200) to 100% in Task Manager. I eventually realized that I was using 70% transparency in my command-prompt window. Setting the command-prompt to 100% opaque resolved the issue completely. There have been numerous issues regarding the Desktop Window Manager that MS has not seemed to resolve yet. After research, I realize that it has happened on different machines with different circumstances with different apps. My issue only occurred on a single machine; all of my other machines never exhibited the issue. On this particular machine, I disabled all hardware acceleration, transparency, and animations for any application that runs on it: for good measure. Just FYI.

Chrome witch hunt

[Tablizer]

Fake news! No crashes. Works perfe

and how is Edge browser running..?

[xanadu113]

Let me guess... the Edge browser is running faster than ever..?

It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run...

Re:and how is Edge browser running..?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, I did try Edge because of problems with Chrome. And Edge is faster, uses half as much CPU and twice as much memory.

Of subject, how did Edge know I have eyesight problems? Everything is so big.

Windows 10 users

[Anonymous Coward]

You. Deserve. It.

Really. F uc k you. Because you allow this evil company to continue doing evil.

'1803 ain't done 'til Teh 'G' don't run!

[Anonymous Coward]

  !EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA!

Isn't it funny how...

[Anonymous Coward]

Everytime there's a windows update there's a problem with chrome but not edge or explorer.

Couldn't happen to two nicer companies

[Anonymous Coward]

They deserve each other.

yup

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a really bad feeling about this update of Windows 10. I preemptively delayed installation until later in May for that reason.

Just like my old boss....

[Anonymous Coward]

screamed at me: We are doing agile! We don't need no fucking testing! Agile dammit! And the asshole got richer than most will ever be.... Lesson learned!

Office kinda got hit with this

[Anonymous Coward]

Sam scenario, seemingly random users too.

Btw, happy 100 Million storyID's Slashdot.

100002314

Windows ain't done until Chrome won't run

[Anonymous Coward]

That sort of says it all.

Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Run Ublock Origin & disable 'Use hardware acceleration when available'. (3 dots top right, Settings, scroll down, Advanced, System / 'Use hardware acceleration when available'

Show me logs

[ArchieBunker]

Put up or shut up. Show me packet captures of Chrome spying. Please, I'll wait.

I resemble that remark!

[Provocateur]

creator who don't care about cleaning their junk.
 
Now don't you dare bring their personal hygiene into THIS discussion!

My Chrome still works...

[xanadu113]

My Chrome still works... it seems to run even better. Guess I lucked out..?

So google chrome is being google chrome?

[AbRASiON]

I'm an extreme browser, nothing short of EXTREME - but damnit why can't they make these things more robust?

I have 32GB of high clocked DDR4, I've got an unoverclocked, 4ghz, 6 core, 2017 intel processor. My machine is a couple of grades off the best 'normal' desktop PC you can buy.

Chrome will still stutter playing back video. I thought flash was the enemy? Why is chrome 'doing stuff' with it's other tabs in the background, impacting my video playback?
I like the idea of multi-tasking, tabs doing some kind of loading / refreshing / whatever I've asked them to do, in the background, within reason. They should get 1 core for all the background tabs at no more than 50% of processing time or something.

Is it Windows? Is this a design thing? I'm very old. I recall people saying "linux doesn't have this" or "Amiga doesn't have that" or "Apple doesn't have this" in regards to how multi-tasking is handled, maybe it's interrupts, handles? Memory allocation? I don't know, I'm a half nerd but for goodness sakes, 6 cores, 32GB of memory, can my primary video playback tab, take ALL the resources it needs on earth, to damn well ensure, smooth video?

I'm not even watching 4k, it's 1080p youtube and it's 100% not a bandwidth issue.

Do I run a lot of plugins? heck yes I do. Should they be able to interrupt a video playing back? No.

I see many others posting about this, it's a common thing - video pauses / stutters *audio continues to play* it's like it can't keep up with the video processing aspect./
How long has this gone on? Funny you should ask, I've been seeing this for several years. Furthermore, I've seen the same thing on Firefox (yeah, I'm that guy, the one who used to whine about poor firefox performance)

I don't understand why it's like this, I just don't. Yeah I'm an edge case (I only have about 120 tabs open today, across 2 windows) but man can't the primary tab or video tab get priority?

Here's some code I'd implement, if I had a clue (I don't, sadly)
#1 - primary tab gets a lot of processing power / memory.
#2 - last used tab gets a mild amount of processing power / memory.
#3 - tabs, to the left and right, of the current tab you're on, get a mild amount of processing power / memory (to ensure, if you want to switch to them it's virtually instant, when you hit CTRL-TAB)

I know it's all fine and dandy to sit on my high horse and complain, without coding skills. However surely this irks others? Surely what I ask is possible? Does what I ask simply not occur on different operating systems? Why can I not have a damn, damn good browsing experience. It's what I do with literally 80% of my PC using time.

(FWIW, both 'new' Firefox and Chrome are VASTLY better than Firefox before the change about 8 - 12 months back, that was, without a doubt a ghastly experience)

https://www.reddit.com/r/techs...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Googl...

https://www.reddit.com/r/firef...

https://www.reddit.com/r/techs...

https://www.reddit.com/r/chrom...

https://www.reddit.com/r/24hou...

Sigh?

Re: So google chrome is being google chrome?

[Monster_user]

Possible, perhaps. Efficient and bug free on initial push/deployment? Unlikely. Such features would more likely cause the features you are describing by the browser trying to manage all that with little telemetry or other feedback data on what the errors or issues actually are. Also not really worth spending time writing a LOT of code to fix a problem only one or two people have. Wouldn't surprise me if those changes reach $1,000,000 in development costs before it was all said and done.

As for suggestions:
You say bandwidth is not an issue, nor does the significantly above average RAM quantity appear to be insufficient, so,...
120 tabs open and bandwidth isn't a factor???

1. Get an SSD. Make sure there is no bottleneck for simultaneous reads and writes to randomly accessed cache data.

2. Try disabling other services and other apps to reduce the difficulty of managing multiple threads.

3. Ideally, as a rule of thumb one shouldn't let the number of tabs exceed 1.5 times the number of cores on the machine, to avoid contention of resources. Especially when a heavy resource page like a video stream is being displayed. Heavy resource pages, such as multimedia streams, will likely need two or three cores exclusively to avoid contention of resources for an uninterrupted stream.

4. Update your graphics card drivers.

5. Get a dedicated graphics card for proper hardware accelleration. Intel should be able to handle a single 1080p video fine. 120 tabs of hardware accellerated content alongside even a single 1080p stream will likely require a more powerful GPU.

6. Make sure you're hardwired in using gigabit ethernet. Wifi introduces a bunch of issues into the bandwidth stream, especially when the connection/channel is shared by multiple devices.

Re: So google chrome is being google chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Post had an error I failed to catch before hitting submit: "Such features would more likely cause the **issues** you are describing..."

Also, I never jump to the immediate tabs left and right. I bounce around rather randomly and chaotically. A group of tabs as "home pages"at the far left, and then groups of tabs at the far right for research against the primary "home" tabs at the far left. With never more than 12 open. So prioritizing the tabs immediately left and right of the active tab would only slow down my browsing experience.

Re: So google chrome is being google chrome?

[AbRASiON]

1, I've been an SSD guy since the Intel G2 160GB, couldn't use a PC without them.

2, Maybe, I wish I had a tool to monitor the actual system cause for this, rather than assume. Perhaps there is one. I can say one thing, it's easily recreated.

3, They should park at 0.1% CPU use tabs idle over 60 seconds, would possibly solve issues.

4, That's done

5, I'm unsure if this would help, it might, I probably have no more than 5 videos open at any one time (bear in mind, PAUSED and or not even started) in background tabs. I only ever view a single video at once.

6, That much is certain.

Firefox

[theshowmecanuck]

'nough said.

NOT THAT........in my case

[Anonymous Coward]

i thought that was the problem of chrome browser...
but after uninstalling it didnt work
i reinstalled it...and working like a charm.....
                                        then i found the problem was with the opera browser.... its causing the freezing of my pc... not chrome not firefox not edge
  check it if that happens in your case...too.....

not that in my case

[Anonymous Coward]

i thought that was the problem of chrome browser...
but after uninstalling it didnt work
i reinstalled it...and working like a charm.....
                                        then i found the problem was with the opera browser.... its causing the freezing of my pc... not chrome not firefox not edge
  check it if that happens in your case...too......

Chrome is freezing

[NikeHerc]

I have the solution to Chrome's freezing: switch to Opera. I did and have abandoned Chrome completely.