I think modern Chrome looks much better on Windows 7. The tabs are quite distinguishable. But on most other systems, especially on Windows 10 (with grayish window frames), it leaves much to be desired.
Maybe it disables only the USB devices inserted during the screen lock? Also the charger is usually connected via USB interface and I don't think it should (or even could, since it's just a power source) be disabled.
YouTube uses a similar technique, when a new video is opened it actually doesn't reload the page despite that the URL changes. The user might want to go back to continue watching the previous video. So how will Chrome know whether this technique is malicious or not? Please tell me if I'm wrong.
From my experience it works almost always perfectly in relatively not complex cases. But it's still quite impressive. It sometimes worked with non real human images, for example anime, robot half face, etc.
Not bad, it did what it supposed to do. Tried with some images, it did the job almost always perfectly. Aslo tried with slashdot screenshoted Einstein's image, no problem. I'm quite impressed.
Mobile cannot completely replace desktop, it usually lacks mouse, keyboard or windowed interface, so no serious job can be done. Mobile is mainly good for content consumption and some touch/gravity oriented apps/games. Other than that - it sucks.
Windows dominance in the next 10 years is another question. It might indeed die a painful death and be replaced with Chrome/Fuchsia OS or something similar. But this doesn't exempt from the fact that GNU/Linux is a failure on desktop which is mainly due to fragmentation, bugs and lack of backward/forward compatibility. Even Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux kernel) agreed in a recent interview that GNU/Linux is a failure on desktop.
The CPU caches the data from speculative execution, this data is indirectly exposed to the application via side channel attack. Disabling speculative execution or discarding the cached data from speculative execution would greatly harm the performance, so it's unacceptable. One possible solution to this is to mark data blocks in the cache as "speculative" if they appeared in the cache from a speculative execution and when the normal code tries to access the respective data, the CPU can emulate some delay (as if it wasn't in the cache initially) and then remove "the speculative" mark. This feature could be toggled on/off by special instructions since many applications don't need to protect themselves from themselves (Spectre in user address space). But this would be useful for something like browser JS/WASM engine which execute untrusted code in their address space. This are just my ideas on how could be the security enhanced.
Many other CPUs (including AMD and ARM) also suffer from various Spectre variants, so it's not Intel-only. Meltdown is the notorious Intel specific issue.
Spectre has many variants and it's almost impossible to fix all of them, it's actually the price for the performance caused by caching. Meltdown is a horrible issue and it should be shame for Intel if they not fix it in the upcoming CPU.
Yeah, NT system calls aren't even publicly documented, only some Windows system utilities possibly use them directly. But there is a chance that MS preserves them anyway, there is no much sense in changing already existing syscalls, it won't add that much performance. Microsoft always pathologically cared about backward compatibility to the extent that they preserved many old API bugs/quirks in order to not break apps misusing them (for example. if I remember correctly, Sim City was freeing the same pointer multiple times and this broke this game on newer Windowses, so MS had to add a compatibility layer for it).
Unlikely. NT kernel works differently, it has many low level features that are missing or work differently in Linux kernel. For example its FS permission system is more complex than *nix "user, other, group". The kernel architecture affects many low level user mode exposed things such as address space layout, system call ABI, Audio/Video subsystem, process/thread stuff, etc. It's impossible to migrate to Linux and preserve 100% binary compatibility. Also what's wrong with NT kernel? As if Linux kernel is free of issues.
I think most of Chrome V8 (Chrome JS engine) generated code ABI is internal (i.e. it doesn't use external OS libraries/features), so V8 implementation depends much more on the target instruction set than on the OS. The few OS specific parts I guess are things related to rendering, audio or files code, and most of them I believe are wrapped in static precompiled images.
The funniest think is that even Bing knows that W10 is a crap. I just opened Bing and entered "windows 10 is a ", it showed me the following suggestions:
"windows 10 is a joke",
"windows 10 is a mess",
"windows 10 is a piece of garbage",
"windows 10 is a pig",
"windows 10 is a dog",
"windows 10 is a spy",
"windows 10 is a pain" and
"windows 10 is a disease".
It didn't showed such negative suggestions for Windows 7/8/8.1 . This shows that Windows 10 has serious problems, it's even worse than Vista. If MS continues to ignore its users, then I guess after the end of Windows 7/8.1 support Windows will start dying slowly and painfully and will be replaced by something like Chrome/Fuchsia OS.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of this browser, when in real life its behavior is not much different or even worse than Chrome's?
yet they want to switch to Chromium engine.
I think modern Chrome looks much better on Windows 7. The tabs are quite distinguishable. But on most other systems, especially on Windows 10 (with grayish window frames), it leaves much to be desired.
Maybe it disables only the USB devices inserted during the screen lock? Also the charger is usually connected via USB interface and I don't think it should (or even could, since it's just a power source) be disabled.
From my understanding, this is not shoved down the users' throats and can be toggled on/off.
YouTube uses a similar technique, when a new video is opened it actually doesn't reload the page despite that the URL changes. The user might want to go back to continue watching the previous video. So how will Chrome know whether this technique is malicious or not? Please tell me if I'm wrong.
That was good one.
From my experience it works almost always perfectly in relatively not complex cases. But it's still quite impressive. It sometimes worked with non real human images, for example anime, robot half face, etc.
Not bad, it did what it supposed to do. Tried with some images, it did the job almost always perfectly. Aslo tried with slashdot screenshoted Einstein's image, no problem. I'm quite impressed.
Mobile cannot completely replace desktop, it usually lacks mouse, keyboard or windowed interface, so no serious job can be done. Mobile is mainly good for content consumption and some touch/gravity oriented apps/games. Other than that - it sucks.
Windows dominance in the next 10 years is another question. It might indeed die a painful death and be replaced with Chrome/Fuchsia OS or something similar. But this doesn't exempt from the fact that GNU/Linux is a failure on desktop which is mainly due to fragmentation, bugs and lack of backward/forward compatibility. Even Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux kernel) agreed in a recent interview that GNU/Linux is a failure on desktop.
Unfortunately neither is Linux ready for desktop or even worse.
The CPU caches the data from speculative execution, this data is indirectly exposed to the application via side channel attack. Disabling speculative execution or discarding the cached data from speculative execution would greatly harm the performance, so it's unacceptable. One possible solution to this is to mark data blocks in the cache as "speculative" if they appeared in the cache from a speculative execution and when the normal code tries to access the respective data, the CPU can emulate some delay (as if it wasn't in the cache initially) and then remove "the speculative" mark. This feature could be toggled on/off by special instructions since many applications don't need to protect themselves from themselves (Spectre in user address space). But this would be useful for something like browser JS/WASM engine which execute untrusted code in their address space. This are just my ideas on how could be the security enhanced.
I wonder if Meltdown is fixed.
Many other CPUs (including AMD and ARM) also suffer from various Spectre variants, so it's not Intel-only. Meltdown is the notorious Intel specific issue.
Spectre has many variants and it's almost impossible to fix all of them, it's actually the price for the performance caused by caching. Meltdown is a horrible issue and it should be shame for Intel if they not fix it in the upcoming CPU.
It's free. If it was paid it would likely be called PaidBSD.
...based browser? So it will download Chrome even faster or/and it will periodically set itself as the default browser?
Yeah, NT system calls aren't even publicly documented, only some Windows system utilities possibly use them directly. But there is a chance that MS preserves them anyway, there is no much sense in changing already existing syscalls, it won't add that much performance. Microsoft always pathologically cared about backward compatibility to the extent that they preserved many old API bugs/quirks in order to not break apps misusing them (for example. if I remember correctly, Sim City was freeing the same pointer multiple times and this broke this game on newer Windowses, so MS had to add a compatibility layer for it).
Then forget about commercial software on *nix. And never complain about half baked FOSS alternatives.
Unlikely. NT kernel works differently, it has many low level features that are missing or work differently in Linux kernel. For example its FS permission system is more complex than *nix "user, other, group". The kernel architecture affects many low level user mode exposed things such as address space layout, system call ABI, Audio/Video subsystem, process/thread stuff, etc. It's impossible to migrate to Linux and preserve 100% binary compatibility. Also what's wrong with NT kernel? As if Linux kernel is free of issues.
It won't help much, there are many Chromium forks and none of them is mainstream.
Agreed, I didn't imply that string_view is a nice thing, it's just a "high level" dirty hack.
I think most of Chrome V8 (Chrome JS engine) generated code ABI is internal (i.e. it doesn't use external OS libraries/features), so V8 implementation depends much more on the target instruction set than on the OS. The few OS specific parts I guess are things related to rendering, audio or files code, and most of them I believe are wrapped in static precompiled images.
The funniest think is that even Bing knows that W10 is a crap. I just opened Bing and entered "windows 10 is a ", it showed me the following suggestions:
"windows 10 is a joke",
"windows 10 is a mess",
"windows 10 is a piece of garbage",
"windows 10 is a pig",
"windows 10 is a dog",
"windows 10 is a spy",
"windows 10 is a pain" and
"windows 10 is a disease".
It didn't showed such negative suggestions for Windows 7/8/8.1 . This shows that Windows 10 has serious problems, it's even worse than Vista. If MS continues to ignore its users, then I guess after the end of Windows 7/8.1 support Windows will start dying slowly and painfully and will be replaced by something like Chrome/Fuchsia OS.