Chrome Bug Returns

May 27, 2009 9:55 PM

Google has once again updated its Chrome browser, and as I seem to remember happening before, the little buttons have disappeared from Metafilter's edit window, that allow you to easily create bold, italic text or a link.
posted by evilcolonel to bugs at 9:55 PM (56 comments total)

Does it still eat massive amounts of processor cycles for comparatively few features?
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:58 PM on May 27

I don't think chrome has ever done that, Pope Guilty. Are you thinking of Internet Explorer? Cause that sounds like Internet Explorer.
posted by boo_radley at 10:03 PM on May 27

My fairly primitive knowledge of Chrome is that if you have multiple tabs open, it uses more resources because each tab is a separate process. If something running in a tab crashes, it only crashes that tab, not the whole browser.
posted by evilcolonel at 10:06 PM on May 27

No, Chrome is the one that is still really buggy despite being out for a year and being built on a mature rendering engine.
posted by smackfu at 10:07 PM on May 27 [2 favorites]

In my experience Chrome is a far worse resource hog than even the abominable IE7. I've seen it run on a handful of systems, and only on the high-end ones was it responsive and quick enough to be described as even vaguely useful.

I want evilcolonel's computer, in other words, since it's apparently powerful enough to actually use Chrome rather than poke at it, go "That's kind of neat, I guess", and go back to Firefox.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:11 PM on May 27

oh, oh! Do Safari next.
posted by boo_radley at 10:13 PM on May 27 [4 favorites]

Hee! Since 2002.
posted by tellurian at 10:15 PM on May 27

Oh hey, I never noticed those buttons down there. How about that.
posted by paisley henosis at 10:21 PM on May 27

I never use them but they sure aren't here on my chrome. Which has always been faster than any other browser I've used on this 4 year old machine.

It has some rendering bugs with metafilter though. *shrug*
posted by aubilenon at 10:24 PM on May 27

I'm currently using Chrome on a 2001(!) laptop with a 1GHz Pentium III and 640 megs of ram, under XP Pro. Works like a charm. (and, I see the buttons. What gives?)
posted by _dario at 10:51 PM on May 27

Formatting buttons are for lamers!!!/i>
posted by pracowity at 11:00 PM on May 27 [3 favorites]

I also lost the buttons... We're all coping, I'm sure, but they were nice to have.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 11:11 PM on May 27

I read this post and had the buttons. I checked for an update to Chrome, updated it, and now the buttons are gone. So yup...
posted by Nattie at 12:31 AM on May 28

Also, I don't get the Chrome hate. I've been using it since release and I've had fewer problems with it than IE, or even Firefox. And I do some freaky shit with my browser, y'all.
posted by Nattie at 12:32 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Ew, man, TMI.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:34 AM on May 28

It's not a Chrome bug at all, just MeFi stupidity.

Matt is sniffing the Browser's UserAgent string. Matt is not clever. I hope his head falls off.
posted by blasdelf at 1:36 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Yep, no little buttons. Not that it's a high priority as far as I'm concerned, but forgive me if I leave a lot of unclosed <em> html tags to screw up whomever comments after me.

I use Chrome on two machines, one of which shipped originally with Windows98SE, and one of which is an underpowered Vista box. It's usually zippy, but once a month I've got to go into task manager and kill me some processes. I'm not sure if Chrome is at fault, it may be google update hogging cycles.
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:27 AM on May 28

Yeah, weird Chrome hate. I've found it much snappier than IE or FF on three different systems (laptop, office Dell and budget self-built home rig). Perhaps a fraction buggier than I'd like, but nothing that I notice most weeks and a darn site less buggy than most 1.0 software.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 2:31 AM on May 28

Yeah, the buttons have vanished for me too, after an update.

I don't get the hate either - I use Chrome on a 5-year-old home-build machine (although it was the absolute duck's guts when I built it, it's pretty clunky by today's standards) and it works fine. If it wasn't for my addiction to Greasemonkey and my aversion to ads, I'd be happy to use it as my only browser. Or Safari for that matter. Much as I love Firefox, it's not as good as either of those out of the box.
posted by dg at 3:08 AM on May 28

Chrome is for people who don't know about Opera.
posted by koeselitz at 3:23 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

…and Firefox is fine and all, but (a) it's slow as hell, and (b) every time I try to use it as a browser, my ADD takes over and I end up spending an hour downloading add-ons and then another hour disabling the ones which are pointless and don't work and playing around with the ones that are cool and fun. With the added benefit of having to wait an extra hour every time I start up the damned browser so that I can tell Firefox that, no, I don't really want to update all twenty gajillion of my add-ons and extensions right now, thank you, I just wanted to google something already.

I tried to go back to Firefox from Opera about three times before realizing that Opera really lacks only one thing for me: complex and well-maintained downloading mechanisms that can grab flvs and download standard stuff at FTP speeds. Now it just makes sense to keep Firefox on my menu bar for downloading junk when I need to and use Opera primarily. To be honest, even just being able to quick-navigate to speed-dial bookmarks improves my productivity vastly; once I realized I can Google anything by doing Control-ct1v Enter, search Wikipedia for anything by doing Control-ct3v Enter, check my email by doing Control-t2-Enter, and hit Metafilter by doing Control-t5-Enter, I really wasn't going to go back to the whole "oh, I'll just roll my mouse up here and click my bookmarks bar!" thing.
posted by koeselitz at 3:37 AM on May 28

Also, for a while there I was running Opera 9.64 on top of Windows 98 on an old ThinkPad from 1997…and it was actually a hell of a lot faster than the IE5 browser that was already installed. And the Opera installer's awesome—exact same installer that I used to put Opera on my Vista 64 machine, so it's pretty universal, and yet it's pretty tiny. I'd like to know how the hell they do that without doing stuff that makes me nervous (like, for example, the only-slightly-less-than-skeezy net install that Chrome does).
posted by koeselitz at 3:47 AM on May 28

Chrome is for people who don't know about Opera.

And Opera is for people who love an assortment of pointless widgets. Virtual fishtank!

I tried to go back to Firefox from Opera about three times before realizing that Opera really lacks only one thing for me: complex and well-maintained downloading mechanisms that can grab flvs and download standard stuff at FTP speeds.

Unless something's changed since, I believe Opera also has a really tedious AdBlock function as well. I also abandoned Opera because of a lack of Context Search, Downthemall, and the aforementioned lack of any way to easily grab flvs. If you just want to browse, and don't mind ads, sure, Opera is fine.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:35 AM on May 28

I'm using FireFox on a 5 year old machine, behind a proxy. I can see the buttons but my arm hurts a little. Is it bicep cancer?
posted by DU at 4:54 AM on May 28

Chrome sounds interesting. Maybe I'll try it when they come out with the Ubuntu x64 version.
posted by double block and bleed at 5:43 AM on May 28

Speaking of which, it just occurred to me that someone, somewhere must have figured out how to make iTunes and wine play nice together by now.
posted by double block and bleed at 5:46 AM on May 28

You can run Chrome in WINE if you want to try it, but I wouldn't recommend that method for making it your primary browser. To download it, use User Agent Switcher to set your browser to Internet Explorer before going to Chrome's download site - that'll get you the .exe instead of the "sorry no linux chrome for you lol" message. Put the .exe in your /.wine directory and run it from there, for best results.

It's a bit unfair to be able to judge Chrome using this method, as you are using a whole other application just to run a browser, so it will make the processes run a little heavy. But surprisingly, I don't find it to be any slower than, say, IE7 (still not as fast as using FF, but like I said, you are using another application to run it, so it stands to reason). I'm using a Debian-based OS and the 2.6.27-7.14 kernel, and Chrome in WINE runs ... alright. No fireworks, but yeah.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 5:51 AM on May 28

koeselitz: "Chrome is for people who don't know about Opera."

Opera is for people who like things to be overly complicated. I really don't get mouse gestures.
posted by dunkadunc at 5:55 AM on May 28

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing: And Opera is for people who love an assortment of pointless widgets. Virtual fishtank!

I tried to go back to Firefox from Opera about three times before realizing that Opera really lacks only one thing for me: complex and well-maintained downloading mechanisms that can grab flvs and download standard stuff at FTP speeds.

Unless something's changed since, I believe Opera also has a really tedious AdBlock function as well. I also abandoned Opera because of a lack of Context Search, Downthemall, and the aforementioned lack of any way to easily grab flvs. If you just want to browse, and don't mind ads, sure, Opera is fine.

Yeah, I can't stand the whole widget infrastructure…but that's actually a feature for me, since I don't really need any of that stuff most of the time, and it only gets in my way and seems to slow down the browser. Meanwhile, Opera has a really functional email client, a good set of developer tools, and a pretty great keyboard-shortcut set. I'm good. I don't really adblock much; I tend to avoid ad- and script- heavy sites anyhow, and if I go into that territory, I always have my backup AdBlock/NoScript/DownThemAll!/FlashGot version of Firefox.

I have to say that one of the things that once almost drove me back to Firefox is the fact that the keyboard shortcuts are obscure, and I didn't know a chunk of them. In fact, it was really just one that bugged me: the "focus-on-address" hotkey, which is so useful for copying the current URL and (for example) adding it to a Metafilter comment on another tab. I was used to using F6, since that's always been the standard key in most browsers. Then, I finally realized I was being a lazy fool and actually looked up the hotkey set for Opera…and found that it's F8. Meanwhile, in most browsers (like Firefox, for example) F6 seems to be disabled on more and more pages. (I can't use a hotkey to focus on the address from Google? What the hell?) In Opera it always works the same; I like that.

dunkadunc: Opera is for people who like things to be overly complicated. I really don't get mouse gestures.

I don't really know anything about mouse gestures. I've never used 'em. I just like to keyboard-surf, and I like my keyboard shortcuts to be consistent.
posted by koeselitz at 6:15 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

My buttons are still there, stop pushing them.
posted by caddis at 7:03 AM on May 28

Will someone with the latest chrome visit the browser check page and send me the User-Agent string? It's everything after Browser:. We only show the buttons for certain browsers, and we base that on the User-Agent string the browser sends to us. It must have changed in the latest update.

Plus, no chrome for Mac yet?
posted by pb at 7:26 AM on May 28

koeselitz: how about control-l for location? Works for Firefox & IE.
posted by Pronoiac at 7:27 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

MStPT: I was excited to see that there's a user switching agent add-on. I was hoping that I could finally see my pay statements online without firing up xp in a virtual machine.

My company's payroll site wasn't fooled. It still says I need IE 5.5 or greater to ensure the security of my information. (I'm howling with sarcastic laughter)

They must be using some ActiveX verification, too.

At least the buttons on metafilter work.
posted by double block and bleed at 7:59 AM on May 28

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/2.0.172.28 Safari/530.5
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:16 AM on May 28

Matt is sniffing the Browser's UserAgent string.

That's pretty much the issue. I used to use an old version of Safari where the formatting buttons would only appear if I set the User Agent to Windows IE. The buttons worked just fine, so, obviously, they aren't browser-dependent in their function. So, why their appearance should be browser-dependent is a mystery to my little brain.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:22 AM on May 28

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/531.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/3.0.182.2 Safari/531.0
posted by kingbenny at 8:22 AM on May 28

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/2.0.172.28 Safari/530.5
posted by evilcolonel at 8:27 AM on May 28

And frankly, I'm having a bit of trouble putting my finger on why I've latched onto Chrome as my default browser. It seems fairly zippy, and I like the New Tab page that shows thumbnails of my most frequent sites.

For a while, I was using Safari for Windows, just because I liked the Mac-style font rendering.
posted by evilcolonel at 8:29 AM on May 28

The buttons worked just fine, so, obviously, they aren't browser-dependent in their function.

They are completely browser-dependent, which is why we check the user agents first. When I first launched them, they only worked in the latest browsers and they were non-functional in everything else. It's likely that you were using a version of safari that added additional javascript support after the major version came out that didn't support it.
posted by mathowie at 8:30 AM on May 28

Duh, they shouldn't use browser user-agent sniffing. Just use the completely dependable APIs to check what features a browser supports. Those exist, right?
posted by smackfu at 8:33 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I use chrome on two older machines - it loads quickly and rarely crashes.
posted by Pants! at 8:39 AM on May 28

> I can see the buttons but my arm hurts a little.

My arm hurts a little too! Matt or pb, please fix that.
posted by languagehat at 8:40 AM on May 28 [2 favorites]

: Duh, they shouldn't use browser user-agent sniffing. Just use the completely dependable APIs to check what features a browser supports. Those exist, right?

Heh. Right.

languagehat: My arm hurts a little too! Matt or pb, please fix that.

Look, this is a problem that we can't help you with. You need to see a doctor now. Isn't that completely obvious?
posted by koeselitz at 8:56 AM on May 28

thanks for posting the user-agent. The buttons should be showing up now, let me know if not.
posted by pb at 9:02 AM on May 28

The buttons should be showing up now, let me know if not.

Hooray! Thanks!
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:31 PM on May 28

koeselitz: how about control-l for location? Works for Firefox & IE.

Or Alt + D, which does exactly what F6 does without popping up a tiny window.
posted by phatkitten at 1:40 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Hey kingbenny, do you have some crazy third generation Chrome browser? 3.0.182.2 instead of 2.0.172.28?
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:52 PM on May 28

My arm has stopped hurting—thanks, pb!
posted by languagehat at 3:08 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

Hey kingbenny, do you have some crazy third generation Chrome browser? 3.0.182.2 instead of 2.0.172.28?

The pre-alpha Mac builds of Chromium are version 3.0.xxx.
posted by tepidmonkey at 4:03 PM on May 28

Your favourite browser sucks.

Sorry, it had to be done.
posted by deborah at 5:53 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the quick fix!
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:00 PM on May 28

If it wasn't for my addiction to Greasemonkey and my aversion to ads

DG, user scripts can be enabled for Chrome. There's also a thing called greasemetal, but I haven't tried it.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:09 PM on May 28

I have a rough spot on my neck. Is it cancer or just a bit of barbecue sauce? (Firefox/Vista/Lenovo x61T)
posted by Joseph Gurl at 1:07 AM on May 29 [3 favorites]

Hey kingbenny, do you have some crazy third generation Chrome browser? 3.0.182.2 instead of 2.0.172.28?

I guess that's because, at some time previous, I remember enabling a user preference to tell Chrome to automatically update to the latest builds instead of just the latest stable builds. Living on the edge, man.
posted by kingbenny at 7:12 AM on May 29

I use Chrome as my primary browser (it seems to be a little faster than FF), and the buttons show up now.

Thanks pb and matt!
posted by KokuRyu at 10:53 AM on May 30

I'm so late to this but I really want to recommend Iron. I like Chrome because it's relatively lightweight and runs really fast on my (incredibly old and shitty) computer, but I don't like that it's from Google and doesn't block ads. Iron's based on the Chrome engine, but designed by SRWare. More importantly, it was designed from the ground up to take privacy and security concerns into account and blocks ads.

I don't know if anyone's going to start using it, but Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Iron/2.0.178.0 Safari/530.9 just in case.
posted by twins named Lugubrious and Salubrious at 1:47 PM on June 1