google is breaking macs

[spartaman64]

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Google has confirmed a Chrome update is at fault for a mysterious reported wave of unbootable Macs. The update was causing issues by corrupting an operating system folder, which prevented those impacted from being able to log in to macOS. 

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Reports of issues first emerged on September 24, when outlets including Bleeping Computer wrote that Avid video editors were discovering they could not boot up their Apple computers after shutting them down.  It was affecting many Hollywood TV and film editors who had Avid Media Creator installed, Variety said. 

Rather than being the result of a virus or Avid update issue, Google has now confirmed a problem with a Chrome for Mac update. Specifically, the issue is causing the /var symlink to be removed due to a bug in Google’s new software updater, codenamed Google Keystone, a Google Chrome open bug post said.

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A Google blog post explains how to resolve the issue. “We recently discovered that a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on macOS machines with System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled, including machines that do not support SIP,” the blog post said, adding that Google has paused the release while it “finalizes a new update that addresses the problem.”

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If you have not taken steps to disable SIP and your Apple computer is on OS X 10.11 or later, the issue will not affect you, the blog post said.

source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/09/26/google-confirms-buggy-chrome-update-is-breaking-apple-macs/#56ec2809391c

 

Of course google claims it was an accident . But why is google chrome doing something with system files anyways? And the article suggests it disproportionately affects people who have avid media creator a video editing software. It seems really weird to be but I'll leave it to the experts to figure it out.

[Guest]

Ok Google, attack Siri.

[Suppersupport]

hey! an exploit for mac!

[5x5]

The pot murdering the kettle is a bit drastic...

[Fnige]

16 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

The pot murdering the kettle is a bit drastic...

It was because nobody liked it calling the kettle black

[ARikozuM]

10 minutes ago, SlimyPython said:

It was because nobody liked it calling the kettle black

I've always like porcelain more. 

[Colonel_Gerdauf]

Chrome is more popular, therefore it's better.

 

Didn't Google get caught doing the same kind of shit people were bashing Microsoft for with the whole IE vs Netscape matter... MULTIPLE TIMES??

[serebrina]

 

Many already say you do not update your programs as soon as the update appears. Do not rskovat your computer.

[LAwLz]

6 hours ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

Chrome is more popular, therefore it's better.

 

Didn't Google get caught doing the same kind of shit people were bashing Microsoft for with the whole IE vs Netscape matter... MULTIPLE TIMES??

Yes, Google have done what Microsoft were doing with IE before. The news in this thread seem to be a (big) mistake though. Not really the same as what you're talking about. 

[TechyBen]

7 hours ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

Chrome is more popular, therefore it's better.

 

Didn't Google get caught doing the same kind of shit people were bashing Microsoft for with the whole IE vs Netscape matter... MULTIPLE TIMES??

Since when do they sell a desktop OS and PC hardware? (Actually they do ChromOS/books, but I don't think they have a monopoly in that industry)

[cj09beira]

should chrome even be writing to that place if its so important?

[Colonel_Gerdauf]

9 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Since when do they sell a desktop OS and PC hardware? (Actually they do ChromOS/books, but I don't think they have a monopoly in that industry)

And do tell me why this is important in relation to what I was pointing out. The backing business models do not matter one bit (though Google's is far more egregious for obvious reasons) when it all leads to the same point, the same kind of anti-consumer acts.

[TechyBen]

2 minutes ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

And do tell me why this is important in relation to what I was pointing out. The backing business models do not matter one bit (though Google's is far more egregious for obvious reasons) when it all leads to the same point, the same kind of anti-consumer acts.

You pointed out Microsoft did anticonsumer things with Internet Explorer. Pretell what those where, and how MS would do it without the hardware+OS industry? (They used OEM builders to include the OS, then the OS to include IE. I'm not sure how Google does that on the desktop. On mobile? Yep, totally! but not desktop).

[Colonel_Gerdauf]

4 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

You pointed out Microsoft did anticonsumer things with Internet Explorer. Pretell what those where, and how MS would do it without the hardware+OS industry? (They used OEM builders to include the OS, then the OS to include IE. I'm not sure how Google does that on the desktop. On mobile? Yep, totally! but not desktop).

Again, these are irrelevant and unimportant details. You can ask LaWLz for the details around IE, since it is a matter that I do not fully agree with. Regardless, while Microsoft had the ActiveX system that only worked well (or worked at all, to a point of time) in IE. What does Chrome have? VP9, for starters, which is a part of the framework of how YouTube functions. It has been shown time and time again that VP9 has been designed to run slower and less efficiently on any browser that is not Chrome. This is despite a lack of design differences that would perhaps warrant this performance disparity.

 

Where does Google get a large sum of its revenue? Advertising and sales of big data, which is only one of so many reasons why I have zero faith in the company nowadays. If it wasn't for YouTube, I would have fully purged out every single google app or account that I have.

[LAwLz]

49 minutes ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

What does Chrome have? VP9, for starters, which is a part of the framework of how YouTube functions. It has been shown time and time again that VP9 has been designed to run slower and less efficiently on any browser that is not Chrome.

This is not true.

I think you're confusing VP9 with something else. VP9 is free and open in every sense of the words. You can blame Google for a lot of shit, but VP9 is not one of them.

The problems with VP9 have strictly been with Microsoft's resistance to adopting a free and open video codec, probably because they have been a large member of the H.264 patent pool. Why support free and open codecs when you are involved with the non-free alternative? VP9 works fine in all browsers nowadays.

 

But Microsoft has changed their stance on that and are now not only supporting VP9, but also AV1 (in collaboration with Google).

 

 

Maybe you're thinking of shadowDOM v0 on the Youtube website?

[Colonel_Gerdauf]

2 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

This is not true.

I think you're confusing VP9 with something else. VP9 is free and open in every sense of the words. You can blame Google for a lot of shit, but VP9 is not one of them.

The problems with VP9 have strictly been with Microsoft's resistance to adopting a free and open video codec, probably because they have been a large member of the H.264 patent pool. Why support free and open codecs when you are involved with the non-free alternative? VP9 works fine in all browsers nowadays.

 

But Microsoft has changed their stance on that and are now not only supporting VP9, but also AV1 (in collaboration with Google).

 

 

Maybe you're thinking of shadowDOM v0 on the Youtube website?

Wait a minute...

 

ShadowDOM is, as I had last checked it, a non-standard HTML5 feature that had very limited implementation.

 

And if it is not VP9, then what the fuck was it that was responsible for selective performance metrics between browsers? It could very well be a combination of things, but when I read the original news about it, a specific file format was noted as the sole culprit.

[TechyBen]

3 hours ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

Again, these are irrelevant and unimportant details. You can ask LaWLz for the details around IE, since it is a matter that I do not fully agree with. Regardless, while Microsoft had the ActiveX system that only worked well (or worked at all, to a point of time) in IE. What does Chrome have? VP9, for starters, which is a part of the framework of how YouTube functions. It has been shown time and time again that VP9 has been designed to run slower and less efficiently on any browser that is not Chrome. This is despite a lack of design differences that would perhaps warrant this performance disparity.

 

Where does Google get a large sum of its revenue? Advertising and sales of big data, which is only one of so many reasons why I have zero faith in the company nowadays. If it wasn't for YouTube, I would have fully purged out every single google app or account that I have.

"Netscape Navigator"

::Goalposts::

"VP9"

[Whoosh]

 

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

ShadowDOM is, as I had last checked it, a non-standard HTML5 feature that had very limited implementation.

Shadow DOM is a standard. It's supported in Chromium browsers as well as Firefox. Old Edge did not support it.

Shadow DOM v0 however, was not really a standard but it was (still is?) used in Youtube. The fallback for Youtube is that it serves browsers a polyfill which implements Shadow DOM v0 in JS. There was some speculation and accusation thrown around that Google did it to slow down other browsers but the Mozilla dev that first discovered it later retracted those accusations after looking into it further.

 

 

2 hours ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

And if it is not VP9, then what the fuck was it that was responsible for selective performance metrics between browsers? It could very well be a combination of things, but when I read the original news about it, a specific file format was noted as the sole culprit.

It depends on what and when you read about VP9.

It caused a lot of performance issues for people with all browsers (even Chrome) because when it first started being used on Youtube, GPUs lacked the logics for hardware accelerated decoding. That meant that if you got served a VP9 video, it would be very slow since it was decoded on the CPU. Edge should not have had this issue though because it didn't support VP9 for a long time, and thus were served H.264 encoded videos instead. H.264 has higher decoding performance but requires more bandwidth.

 

So people complaining about VP9 could have been complaining because:

1) They used Edge which didn't support it, thus requiring higher bandwidth than if they used Firefox or Chrome.

2) They were using a VP9 compatible browsers with a GPU that didn't support it, thus getting very high CPU usage and low performance because of that.

 

In any case, VP9 isn't optimized for Chrome specifically, but there were some performance implications with it. Most of that should be gone now, but we will soon see the same thing happen with AV1 (which is co-developed with Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Amazon, AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Netflix, etc) because of a lack of GPU support (might show up in 2020 or 2021 gen hardware).

[Yeroh]

If you're using Chrome on a Mac you're doing it wrong, anyway. Nowadays it's Firefox or nothing.