http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=66129
Wow, case study for Google arrogance.
Because I’ve been playing with Fedora lately, I started using the Chrome browser.
I’m also writing a new tool to replace my really old visual basic / IE based research tools. The high level description is I read what I know about a station from my database, then open the station web site in an IFRAME. I can then navigate around inside the iframe – looking for a stream, correcting an out-of-date 404 error, get the program schedule, etc… An IFRAME is essentially a web page inside a web page that operates independently – the polls I use are in an IFRAME so when you vote, it doesn’t have to reload the entire web page.
When using my tool in Fedora / Linux / Chrome, I noticed the right click is missing some very obvious and necessary things – what is the URL currently loaded in the IFRAME?, show me the source code, let me open this page in a new window/tab outside of the current page.
Well, it turns out the Chrome developers have decided you *don’t need* to be able to do that and they aren’t going to allow you to do it no matter how many people want it and how rational their justification is. Google knows what you want, and you have no choice, so just shut up.
yum remove chrome
yum install firefox
We always have choices.
buh-bye Chrome…
I realize the Chrome open source project isn’t Google before I get pounced on – but Google is the one supporting the development and actively trying to spread its adoption by promoting it on the Google web site and bundling it with other Google products.
I recall another “too big to fail” company that decided not to give customers what they wanted. IBM. And then along came a little upstart called Microsoft…
My assumption is that the Chrome developers are covering up some vulnerabilities of the cross site scripting kind.
One reason I have kept using my VB6 thingy is it uses an embedded Webrowser object that allows the VB code to traverse the DOM and interrogate the browser for things like the URL of the current page.
IFRAMEs are a major problem for cross site scripting attacks. If I can put a frame around a target page and then load that page and if I had access to the DOM, I can interrogate things in the page, manipulate the html code and do all sorts of unpleasant things. The parent window of and IFRAME is not even allowed to know the URL of that page in the IFRAME, which is an annoyance. Firefox and IE will “give up” that information by right clicking… it’s still a PITA, but workable.
One thing I realized (I think) is that my current tool is highly insecure – when the Webbrowser object is running inside a VB project, the instance of IE is an effective attact vector. It enforces its own security model, but if something slips past that, the attacker then has the powers of the VB app, meaning basically do anything you want to anything on the computer. All of my recent virus/trojan attacks that worked came while I was using my tools.
Hey Art: you ever use Opera ? i thought about it a bit , maybe a little safer? I don’t know.
what have you heard about Opera browser?
thanks!
I have a personal grudge against Opera…
Back when it first showed up – about the time Netscape and Microsoft were in a fight to the death with AOL in the middle, Opera 3.62 came onto the scene. Unlike the other browsers, you had to pay for it – something like $25. Being the type of person I am, I “voted” for competition and bought a copy. At the time, it was pretty buggy, but it was an alternative. Opera is located in Norway, and you had to send them the payment in their currency – pretty scary sending off money for a product some company you don’t know in another country.
So maybe six months later, they came out with Opera 5.0 and announced they would like me to buy it again. I declined their generous offer.
(I also paid for a copy of Google Earth shortly after Google bought Keyhole based on the same principle)
I’m still curious to know how Anders (the Oslo terrorist) made his money that allowed him to spend years writing his manifesto.. hmmmm…… …. what are the chances….?
I just installed Opera in Fedora to see what I think.
It has most of the things you expect a current browser to have – tabbed browser, integrating phishing protection….
Now I’m not an inexperienced web user…. but found it impossible to find out where the “Preferences/Settings” were. The introductory video didn’t mention it, there is no obvious control or menu item on the browser.
After poking around in their forums (many of the people there have trouble expressing themselves in English), it looks like you type about:config in the address bar.
To be remotely useful, it needs to be able to import my existing bookmarks – Firefox and Chrome know that and make it obvious how to do it.
Down in the “Install Preferences” there are a number of items with no explanation what they do. The first item is labeled “Custom Bookmark Merge File” – sounds interesting…. clicking on the “?” for an explanation gives me the detailed explanation of “File Name of the Custom Bookmark File to import”. Well that was helpful…. not
This browser looks like the Swiss Army knife of browsers – it has 1000 options (see: Feature Creep) and no explanation how to use any of it.
Moonlight (the Linux Silverlight clone) isn’t supported in Opera – only Chrome and Firefox. If you aren’t using Linux, that’s not an issue – but it will be for me.
What runs faster , Google Chrome or California Chrome?
I’m experimenting with creating new tools that traverse the HTML Document Object Model (DOM) by loading the document into PHP and traversing it looking for things like player links, programming schedules, etc.
What I’m doing now is taking the now idle eMachine and installing Fedora 20 on it as a dual boot machine installed on the internal hard drive. Probably next weekend, I’ll move “production” back to it so I can avoid doing new development on the live system.
I would like to try again to create SOAP support to do predictive drop down lists like in the program search