Goodbye, Chrome (How Chrome got me banned from hacker news) | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye, Chrome (How Chrome got me banned from hacker news)

blettr.com

45 pointsapersson57 comments

I understand it's a bit superficial to re-enforce the common sense rejoinder discussed at the end about not using developer builds.

- but isn't the idea of using a developer build at least partly an issue of wanting to discover bugs like these and report them, as opposed to just getting access to the latest and greatest new features? You know, so you make a contribution to the cause?

It is annoying though that an install of both chrome devs and the ie9 betas overwrite the stable versions. The firefox beta at least installed elsewhere so I can easily use the old version if I like without having to dick around with it.

From the blog post:

>How the hell can a program at this level of maturity have such a massive problem...

Because it's a dev build! Do people really need to be reminded of that! Dev builds are for developers!

So what if the FF dev build is more stable? Both sites explicitly say they are unstable and for testing only. To have a problem and blame the dev build is insane. Any "self-respecting geek" should know that.

And since it's a dev build, when it fails, then a proper bug should be filed. Bitching about it on HN is counter productive (and karma-whorish, IMO)

And a rant wrapped in untested broken markup that lets the text end after three sentences with a big black banner saying "Make your own card at some spammy site" that you can't scoll past on mobile browsers... Classy, indeed.

Yeah - I was using the Chrome dev for a while. It was so stable for so long that I completely forgot I was using it. Then one day some weird stuff started happening. I got all upset and ranty like the guy from this article until finally my higher mind said: 'it's a dev build you fool!' - I felt stupid and went back to stable.

At least I came to my senses eventually.... before I had written some rantox that had made it to the top of hacker news... <thank god>

At least you were smart enough to call yourself a fool before someone else did it for you.

I've been running Chrome dev for several months and have just about forgotten it's a dev. So far I haven't hit any major issues.

That's what I don't get...he went to all that trouble of researching the 'problem' he lists the dev build, etc. I guess not everyone is familiar with what branching and releases are for.

You might consider looking into something like Instapaper[1] or Read It Later[2] for your offline reading needs, rather than try to maintain an unwieldily tab set.

[1] http://www.instapaper.com/

[2] http://readitlaterlist.com/

Another nice feature is that you can read just the text without all the other 'junk', like Readability http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ does for you.

Handy for this blog post because there's something preventing scrolling the page on the iPad. Reads fine in Instapaper though!

Has anyone else had this happen? I can loosen the ban thresholds if it's a common problem with Chrome.

disclosure: I work for Mozilla.

Chrome is trying some aggressive tactics in its developer builds (I think that is cool). What they're doing is speculatively opening sockets to servers, and also opening a second socket if their first attempt doesn't get a response quickly enough. It's pretty easy to see how a bug in this stuff, or even just the expected behavior, could trigger abuse filters. But, as I said, I think it is worth doing. All these web startups will make more money if the Web is faster.

Also, Namoroka is the Firefox 3.6 branch. Try Firefox 4 dev builds!

It did happen to me, with a developer build of chrome on windows several months ago. I took it as a sign to moderate my HN habit and got another IP from my isp. Actually the moderating part hasn't worked out so well, so if there was a problem it's gone.

It would be helpful to communicate something along the lines of "You're hitting our servers at an excessively high rate. Your IP has been blocked for x hours. Please take action to keep this from happening again."

You could also list possible benign causes (e.g. browser problems, naive crawling/scraping implementations).

This should reduce some confusion and save you some email.

Been using chrome (windows and OS X), often with tons of HN tabs open. No ban problems for me (though I'm on release instead of Chromium).

No problem here; running the latest Dev chrome, usually no more than 4-5 HN tabs open at a time, though.

I used to have it happen on a regular basis using Firefox (though it seemed to happen only when I was logged in).

Hasn't happened in quite a while, though. (And yeah, I browse like him, leaving many tabs open as "to read later..." notes.)

hasn't happened to me. i'm usually running the latest chrome dev build with 2-3 tabs open (sometimes to HN) at a time. but i'm not exactly a "fervent" user. maybe it's different for others.

Its not a common problem with Chrome. Its a common problem with someone who uses a browser like an idiot.

Using a dev build of a browser, then opening 100s(?) of tabs, not using a flashblock. I don't care which browser you use, if you have 100s of tabs open and you have flash running, your memory usage will balloon without you having to do anything wrong at all.

After the browser crashed, he restarted his tabs (it usually prompts you to open previous tabs in stable version) that caused his browser to crash in the first place? What did he expect was going to happpen? Not crash this time?

Also the guy is using dev version. What is he bitching about?

"I don't care which browser you use, if you have 100s of tabs open and you have flash running, your memory usage will balloon without you having to do anything wrong at all."

You obviously haven't used Opera.

I have used opera and continue to try every single beta and alpha released every other month. Opera does have a small memory footprint and better memory management overall; but what does that has to do with flash memory leaking/hogging problem?

How is opera going to manage 100s of tabs running in the background with flash element chipping away memory?

The problem is flash not the browser. The more tabs you have open with flash elements in them, the more memory they are going to use. The solution to that problem is to either not have insane amount of tabs open or use flashblock.

Dude, relax, take a Valium or something.

Also IMHO, using "flashblock" is disrespectful of other people's work. If a website bothers you so much, stop visiting it and go somewhere else. It's kind of like voting with your wallet and it works ;)

> Also IMHO, using "flashblock" is disrespectful of other people's work. If a website bothers you so much, stop visiting it and go somewhere else. It's kind of like voting with your wallet and it works ;)

I could use the same silly reasoning and argue that overuse of flash is disrespectful to users but that would make us both sound stupid.

So when going to the Mall, it is OK to steal because you don't like the checkout experience?

It's only silly in the wrong context: Wikipedia's value is coming from its users. Google's value comes from them.

Ads have become too intrusive. Some people have bandwidth caps too, and flash video ads aren't the most productive use of that bandwidth.

If you're going to use blockers, some people have a tendency to get pissed and to do something about it, like inventing a much bigger and better mouse trap.

I'm not seeing any ad-blockers for the iPhone, and it gets harder and harder to unlock the latest models.

Again, the best thing you can do is to stop using/supporting those services that serve intrusive ads. And if you cannot because it is so good as to be irreplaceable, then respect those decisions because some people worked their butts off trying to make your life better.

Using flashblock is not at all disrespectful. Sites can still serve text ads (remember those?) and graphics (even animated gifs, if they are so inclined) to you.

If flashblock is a common phenomenon (I don't use it because I shun sites that have abusive flash ads), it's because advertising networks do an extremely poor job at policing the kind of ads that they publish. (To be honest, they do a better job at it than a couple years ago when you could get the flashy-blinky-type that would play sound without being asked to)

Unfortunately, with Flash's security record, Flashblock is less disrespectful and more of a necessity. It seems like there's a new zero-day in the wild every couple of weeks.

I currently have 72 tabs open. Yes, I am a tab addict and I need to go through and close/bookmark many of those tabs (and install a tab limiting extension). However, only a few of those a HN tabs. Many of them are stories linked to by HN.

I have the same exact problem as the OP. I'm running Chromium 9.0.567.0 on Ubuntu 10.04 and a couple of days ago I was getting the same error page. I wondered why I was getting this error. I tried clearing the cookies thinking there was something wrong with my login cookie and using different browsers, but nothing worked.

The only thing that made sense was that my IP was banned, which confused me seeing as I didn't think I had done anything worthy of being IP banned.

Luckily, I saw this post (on a different IP address) and I'm certainly going to use a less bleeding edge version of Chromium from now on.

p.s. If you see this PG, can you please unban my IP? I promise to use a browser that won't bombard HN with requests, and to use less tabs :)

Edit: For the record, I only had 3 HN tabs open. For people wondering how 3 tabs could trigger a flood of requests, check out this reply to PG http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872177

So you work for Mozilla but have dozens of tabs open in chromium? I'm interested as to why this is the case. I've found Chrome to simply be a nicer browser. It does everything I want, and nothing I don't. I switched from FF about a year ago, and haven't looked back. I can even deal with all of the flash problems with a copy of FF that I open should I need it.

What's your rationale for being such a heavy chrome user? Is it market research, or personal preference?

Check the usernames again. I am not sayrer, but he had an insightful comment worth linking to.

Personally, I do prefer Chrome/Chromium, even though it uses more ram and cpu than firefox 3+.

My mistake. I assumed when you linked to that reply that your were linking to your own reply, but I failed to check the usernames.

Maybe I'm dense but I can't figure out what kind of bug the OP is claiming is acting up here. Does Chrome just sometimes decide to send hundreds of HTTP GET requests for no reason? Is it attempting to pipeline per the HTTP spec and just screwing up? This article is so high on rant and low on information I can't tell what's going on. Have you checked if there's a bug report or filed one yourself?

Sounds like he has an ungodly amount of tabs open and Chrome isn't smart enough to say, "Hey, I have 50+ tabs open on the same website, maybe I shouldn't try to refresh all of them at the same time."

But why refresh them at all? Once a page is open in a background tab, surely Chrome won't just refresh it in a loop for the hell of it?

I am a serial tab abuser. Its my lazy Instapaper. As bad as that sounds on its own, I often would not close firefox, in fear of restarting it later and fire a cascade of page loads. After a few days FF would have grabbed a major chunk of my RAM (even with flashblock).

The Restore Control add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/177558/ is a big relief. It opens a tab but does not load the content unless I actually click on it. I can now easily close and restore FF. It comes up in a (slowish :-) snap, as it only loads the last page that was active. The rest are opened as "empty" tabs to be loaded on demand.

This is entirely off-topic, but your reply made me instantly think of Randall Munroe's comic about how emoticons and parentheses are mutually exclusive.

http://xkcd.com/541/ for the context

Ok, a few replies:

1. Point on signal versus noise taken. A large part had to do with that I didn't have the time and skill to dive into problem more deeply (e.g. to get some sort of request trace from Chromium and file it as a bug). It was late, I should only post in the morning after sleeping on my posts.

2. Point on dev builds (and Chrome vs. Chromium) also taken. I realize it's one thing to use "trunk" on something that I use as a developer, where I engage with the software as a producer, and another to use it for software that I just want to work and not worry about it. I will switch my browsers to stable versions, since I'm a browser consumer, not developer.

3. Number of open tabs: During this incident, I had perhaps 40 to 50 tabs open, with around 10 to 15 hacker news pages.

4. Requests on restart were not the problem - I connected the browser to a dead proxy before restarting, and then went through the tabs stopping each one manually. Only after that did I reactivate my connection. My annoyance came from the fact that Chromium just started hammering away at pages "behind my back" so to speak, after I had manually told it to stop trying to connect.

5. Thanks for your recommendations on bookmarking alternatives.

6. I posted this here because hacker news was the only site that issued me a fairly explicit ban, and I wanted to help others with the same problem out. A few people responded that they've had the same/similar problems, so it wasn't a total waste.

My old roommate used to be a tab whore -- it got so bad that eventually every time he opened up firefox a million tabs would try to load up and temporarily kill our bandwidth.

Anyway, I don't know how many tabs you keep open but I'm sure a little organization can drastically cut them down (get in a habit of hitting ctrl+w once you're done with a 'dead end' page.) If organization is too hard just periodically close everything and it won't be too bad.

Or at least moving to something like Instapaper, ReadItLater, or (on Firefox) MAFF.

Just a suggestion, buddy:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/egnjhciaieeiiohk...

Here's the Tab Wrangler plugin. I have a problem with keeping a bajillion tabs open, too, but instead of just leaving them open, I have this thing clean up after my mess. There are similar plugins for Firefox, too, by the way.

Just curious, how many tabs did you have open? Also a Flash blocking extension seems like it would come in handy in your multi-tab situation.

I suspect it was an enormous number of tabs, either way it the browser shouldn't have been causing enough requests to get him banned.

I am the complete opposite. Having more than 4 tabs open feels like working at an untidy desk. I can't cope with it!

For about the last week or two I have been randomly receiving the same error:

"Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): Unknown error."

when navigating to a page. I am running Chrome 7.0.517.41 on both Windows Vista and Windows 7 and experience the issue on both systems. Usually I can just hit refresh and the page loads properly, with no problems. Sometimes though I find myself having to close Chrome altogether and restart.

After reading this I will have to look and see if it is doing something similar when it gets this error. The error is very random and doesn't matter if I have one tab or 15 tabs open. I rarely keep more than 10-15 tabs open at once though.

Why not just Bookmark pages you want to read later? By the way, I keep a lot of tabs open and I had never such problem with Chrome. And I don't think it's fair to blame Chrome(you meant Chromium) for Flash's bus.

Interesting. I frequent a site that I open dozens of tabs on every day. If you open more than a few at the same time, it will tell you that you are abusing the system. I keep those tabs open for quite a while sometimes.

I've done that with the Chrome beta for Linux and Windows both.

I have never had it tell me that I'm abusing the system while I had those tabs open.

Not saying it doesn't happen, but that there may be more than meets the eye here... It might not even be Chrome, but Flash, or an extension or something else.

If I use the anonymouse.org proxy (I use it because I like accessing isohunt), I get kicked off after a while. I usually just load it in firefox now without any problems.

I wonder if this is the reason I get kicked off.

So no details on what is happening?

My guess (without trying it myself) is that HN's web server is not following some HTTP protocol, which is confusing Chrome.

Is it possible for the browser to prefetch hwinfo from the computer and customize the installation accordingly?

From my experience the chrome dev-build on linux crashes a lot, whereas the mac dev-build ist really usable.

On an unrelated note, your blog renders broken on the iPad; scrolling down the page does not work.

Why the heck do people open this many tabs? Bookmarks exist for a reason.

I rarely let myself go beyond 8-10, because tabs are essentially useless and forgotten once the density increases to the point you can't read the tab title. (note: I do only have a 12" screen, so this number is lower than some people)

This is a joke right? You opened a lot of tabs, were surprised that it sent a lot of requests, and are blaming the browser?

Am I missing something? If you save your tabs and reopen them, what exactly do you expect besides it trying to... open them?

The complaint was that after he stopped loading the page, each tab would request the page again, not that a browser full of tabs loaded all the pages once.

Apparently it was hammering those pages, reloading multiple times.

the lesson here is to disable flash

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