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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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