For what it's worth
It crashes in linux as well (but nicely)
A bug in the most recent version of the Chrome allows miscreants to crash browser tabs simply by embedding a link with a malformed URL in the HTML of a page. The vulnerability, dubbed "AwSnap" by web developer Jason Blatt, affects Chrome version 41 on Windows, OS X, and Chrome OS, though reports vary as to whether it exists in …
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This is the kind of question you should ask yourself and test before you post an article which contains a link to the reddit page with the exploit... do your readers' Chrome installations pre-fetch the reddit page after loading the article page and go boom?
Happily, as I have Firefox, I won't have to find out.
When did any Google beta ever end?
Serious question. As far as I can tell, Google software goes direct from "beta" to "retired", without ever entering a state varyingly called "stable" or "released" or whatever the heck lying term the company is trying to insinuate translates to "fit for purpose".
1995 and Microsoft's ping of death, *really* blowing up the internet with >64k ping packets.
Microsoft's immediate response, threaten litigation against anyone who claimed the ping of death was real, switch out their NT 4 FTP servers with Sun boxes and claim the x86 hardware was overloaded, *then* eventually issue a patch.
No worries about self driving cars.
They'll just.
stop.
And considering the traffic I deal with daily on my commute, that will be BETTER than the moronic lane dodging, bumper drafting, cell phone reading, signals and headlights optional, non shoulder checking, squirrel gawking mopes.
At least a dead in the water googlemobile will be immobile and I can drive around it.
Right, it's not like any cars from say 2009/2010 had an issue with sudden acceleration.... or others randomly applying the electronic handbrake at speed for example... No Audi needed or involved in those 2 incidents.
What's more worrying is when the manufacturer tried to initially deny, then blamed on foot mats, then mechanical issues before going into out of court settlements when the 'drive-by-wire' system came into question.
Current cars already have software/mechanical issues the manufactures dispute exist, you think it's going to get better as the software gets more complicated and they can't blame the driver because the driver had no control?
Developers that try to do pre-fetching and the like need to be taken out back and shot. In my experience, anytime a developer tries to make something smarter, it ends up being an idiotic pile of buggy spaghetti code that wastes more time than it saves, not to mention the security holes that get opened up.
Doing DNS pre-lookups is dangerous in that a spammer could send a URL in an email to determine if an address is valid the second a user opens the message. Normally they'd use 1x1 pixel images, but email programs killed that by no loner loading images.. Now there is no way to prevent it.
On the upside, the pre-fetching is relatively easy to disable, though the naming is a bit flakey - "Predict network actions to improve performance".
I'm not sure what benefit it really gives, even on a slow connection I tend to find DNS resolution is often the fastest element of accessing a new site.
The page pre-loading functionality is potentially fucking scary too (disabled by the same checkbox) - Chrome will try and work out which link on a site you're likely to click on next and then pre-load in the background.
You can drop meta-tags into a page to tell Chrome what to prefetch (so presumably link rel='dns-prefetch' href='lorem ipsum.......' would also cause a crash) - so can do link rel="prerender" href="myevilpage.htm"
Google's docs note that pre-rendering is resource heavy, so in theory (at least) you could probably also create a page that just spams the browser with prerender.
On iOS you can crash Chrome just going to some pages on the Telegraph and Guardian websites that are normal pages. British airways website as well can kill Chrome, so it's not just drive-boy's but shitty code from the Chrome developers in general.
I've been filing bug and crash reports for 14 months and no reply..