Chrome Canary - Wonderful but flawed - Just like me

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"He's dead, Jim!".  That's what Chrome Canary tells me every time I try to play a youtube video. Chrome Canary and Windows 7 doesn't let youtube work. You always get the purple screen of death saying that Chrome ran out of memory.

When you download Chrome ( from here: https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/canary.html ), the splash page warns you.  It says" Get the Bleeding Edge of the Web".  It says that this browser is not for the faint-hearted and it crashes regularly.

The splash page also says: "Google Chrome Canary has the newest of the new Chrome features.
Be forewarned: it's designed for developers and early adopters, and can sometimes break down completely."

So why did I get it? I am a developer among other things. When I develop Android, and I have an app with a web widget, often things like javascript breaks down.  These kind of web errors are often not reported in the Software Development Kit.  Only Java errors that throw exceptions are regularly recorded.  So when your app goes Islamic Terrorist Irrational on you, you can connect the USB cord to the Android device, type in chrome://inspect and click on devices, and you can get an idea of why you app has gone ape-crap or bat-crap crazy. A javascript console can be a very helpful thing.

Other features is that Chrome Canary is blazing fast.  In fact the only negative so far, is that it craps out with youtube and win7.  I am willing to bet though, that it doesn't crap out in a Chromebook.

Chrome Browser Crashes

I had Chrome go down again.  It told me that a heap has been corrupted.  I have a debugger, so I got the exact place where the Chrome Browswer died.  Here are the gory details:


Unhandled exception at 0x771815de in chrome.exe: 0xC0000374: A heap has been corrupted.

Debugger information:  The heap:
771815B4  mov         eax,12Eh 
771815B9  xor         ecx,ecx 
771815BB  lea         edx,[esp+4] 
771815BF  call        dword ptr fs:[0C0h] 
771815C6  add         esp,4 
771815C9  ret         18h  
771815CC  mov         eax,12Fh 
771815D1  xor         ecx,ecx 
771815D3  lea         edx,[esp+4] 
771815D7  call        dword ptr fs:[0C0h] 
771815DE  add         esp,4 

Google Chrome Pages Unresponsive Problem

Chrome has lost its shine for me.  I just wasted a few hours trying to get my wife's machine running.  She is not a heavy internet user and uses it primarily for email, the odd Skype chat and streaming a radio station.  So yesterday, Chrome started to misbehave.  It simply wouldn't work.  The picture above showed with the message:

The following page(s) have become unresponsive.  You can wait for them to become responsive or kill them.

So what to do.  At first I thought it was the machine.  It is an old one with Vista and Celeron processor.  I ran a registry cleaner.  I cleaned out the cache and cookies.  When that didn't work, I uninstalled Chrome, and re-installed.  Then it wouldn't even start.  I uninstalled it again, and ran the best virus and malware program that I have.  It ran all night.  Nada.  The machine was clean.

I tried Internet Explorer.  It worked just fine and relatively fast.  I suspected that Google made an update to Chrome.  I spent an hour or two Googling.  A Google site suggested that I navigate to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\  and change Default folder name to backup Default.  Nothing.

Another suggestion was to append --no-sandbox in the shortcut panel to the command line.  Nada again.

I was just about to give up, when I tried this one last thing:

• Right click google chrome shortcut.
• Click on properties menu itme.
• Click shortcut tab in the opened panel.
• add this in target destination --disable-hang-monitor

to make it look like this:

"C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-hang-monitor

This made Google Chrome work again.  But it sure took the shine off of Chrome for me.

Chrome Blocking Extensions Part II

In a previous blog entry, I described how I added Chrome Browser extensions to prevent tracking cookies. Sites like CNN and New York Times and such sell tracking cookie information to all comers, and since I am a privacy advocate, it was starting to tick me off. So, I added DisconnectMe, Ghostery, and Do Not TrackPlus to my Chrome browser, and life was good.

I added the Adblocker, and that threw me my first curve ball. I couldn't access my Google account to see how much money my online ads were making. That made me take off AdBlocker.

Last week I discovered another fly in the ointment: Expedia.

The reason that I use Expedia is simple. I wanted in overnight hotel room in city that was 5 hours away. I just wanted a quick stopover, a place to lay my head and to get up and continue my journey. I knew of just the hotel that I wanted to stay at and where it was. I went to their site, and got what I thought was a reasonable price. To double check, I went to Expedia.

That same hotel room was 30 per cent cheaper on Expedia for the same night. I immediately booked it. I couldn't complete the online transaction. It kept telling me to wait a second and try again. After 15 minutes of this, a Eureka moment struck me. I turned off the Chrome Extension blockers and all worked well. I was able to book my hotel online.

Luckily most of these blockers have a little icon in the corner of the browser where you can turn them off and on. However, I wasted a quarter of an hour figuring this out.

Blocking Extensions for Chrome

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Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a privacy freak. I also use Google Chrome which is the safest, fastest, best browser in the marketplace.

I just got a new laptop, and I had forgotten to add my privacy extensions. However I was reminded when an old highschool friend sent me an invitation to join her on Facebook, and since she had my email address, the Facebook code read my contacts and suggested other friends that were not connected to her, but were to me.

Since I get my email through my browser, I decided that it was time to add the privacy extensions. I added Disconnect.me, Ghostery and Do Not Track Plus. I also added Ad Block, but I had to disable it, because I couldn't read how much money that I was making on the ads for Google Adsense.

However, I am quite pleased with the performance of the blocker privacy extensions for Chrome. So far, the worst offender for tracking in my experience, is the CNN.com website.

As an added feature for today, you get a fearless prognostication. Facebook stock is going to tank today. The closing price was $20.38 and I'm willing to bet that it will close lower today.

Desperate Microsoft -- Internet Explorer 8

How pathetic. I just signed out of Hotmail, and instead of a re-direct to MSN.com, instead I get a re-direct to a page called beautyOfTheWeb. The above is a screenshot. You will notice that the request parameters for the URL in the navigation bar say XP and Google Chrome browser, what I use on my laptop.

Then Microsoft has the temerity to tell me that my browser scores a 2.5 out of 4, and that I should download Internet Explorer 8 along with the Bing search tool and MSN.

I got off Internet Explorer because it is a piece of crap software that is virus prone, and using it, I got a virus that destroyed my desktop computer. Since using Firefox and Chrome, along with Avira, I haven't had a virus ever again.

And they want me to trust them? Ha!! I read that finally the IE browser by Microsoft is no longer dominant in the marketplace, and I say "It's about time". Now they have to resort to scare tactics which are patently untrue, and they have to hijack me when I sign out of Hotmail.

Truly, Microsoft is on the way of the dodo bird.