/dev/null

Today, I prepared for the upcoming PHP/JS conferences and had a look at the mysterious bug #883 of Google Chrome and those related to it. Also I read though SquirrelFish source, which is used by Safari 4.

The reason for the odd behavior of Chrome seems to be a if/else construct that is repeated throughout the source of runtime.cc:

// Check if the name is trivially convertible to an index and get
// the element if so.
if (name->AsArrayIndex(&index)) {
return GetElementOrCharAt(object, index);
} else {
PropertyAttributes attr;
return object->GetProperty(*name, &attr);
}


Chrome makes a difference between properties and elements. And they do weird type casts. If you check JavaScriptCore, you see there is a better way:

inline JSValue JSObject::get(ExecState* exec, const Identifier& propertyName) const
{
PropertySlot slot(this);
if (const_cast(this)->getPropertySlot(exec, propertyName, slot))
return slot.getValue(exec, propertyName);

return jsUndefined();
}


Iterating over an objects properties can result in a seemingly random order, it’s always the same order in Chrome, but in a different order for other browsers. I posted this as bug #223 a couple of weeks ago. John Resig posted the same issue as ticket #883 a day later. It was confirmed in the meantime by the chromium developers and described as an expected behavior. Very funny.

Q: Wenn ich den Links zum der Browser-Crash Demo Folge, dann brauch ich
bei der letzten Seite nur noch mit der Maus über den “HERE” – Button
zu fahren und mein ( mit allen Updates versehenes ) Vista friert
sofort vollständig ein… Spricht das jetzt eher gegen Google oder Microsoft..?

A: Der Tenor nach der Veröffentlichung des Browsers lautet doch: Google
greift Microsoft an. qed.

Aus dem heise forum

I just found my first bug in Chrome: If you iterate over object properties (using jQuery’s $.each()) and insert HTML generated inside that loop into the DOM, then that HTML appears in random order. Very funny. Might be a problem with threads or Chrome changes the order of object properties by itself:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=223

There was a posting re “Mozilla’s Thought On Google’s Chrome” on Slashdot today… which has a comment that underlines what I wrote earlier:

IMHO, the real target is MS Office. Google makes their money from advertising, which means eyeballs and correlated data. Unfortunately for them, many people spend a majority of their day inside MS Word and MS Excel and other apps. Google would love to have those eyeballs and all that data to better shape their profiles and thus better deliver advertising. What better way than to get all those different apps to “occur” inside the browser?

Google will publish a beta version of it’s own Web browser tomorrow. Sadly, the beta will run on Windows only. Of course, they put some energy in speeding up JavaScript execution as they need this for their own applications. Otherwise they simply won’t be able to provide solutions that can compare with traditional offline applications.

For more information check out the online book about Chrome or the Google Blog.

While visiting the Google Blog, I found out, that a JS warning window appears in Firefox 3, if you hit the back button too fast. You’ll see something like this:


SyntaxError: unterminated string literal
w_xa()@:0
eval("try {\n_WidgetManager._HandleControllerResult('Blog1', 'backlinks',{'numBacklinks': [...]

JSONP seems to be unstable in certain conditions. What makes me wonder is why the browser starts to execute incomplete code and outputs that code in an alert dialog. So, it might as well be the fault of the Google Widgets error handler… but who cares anyway.

The thing is, any time you get a provider in the market that has a predominantly large share of that market, questions start to get asked about their practices, about what their motives are. I desperately hope that they [Google]…in fact I expect that they will change. They will become as grown up as some of the larger companies around, so in some respects it’s a predictable thing.

Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist

As you can see from my recent postings, the submission on Slashdot asking Has Google Lost Its Mojo? is no surprise to me. Here’s an interesting comment:

Speaking as a Googler, “some” is an understatement. The best and brightest have been exiting Google at the earliest for months, leaving behind the political climbers, backbiters and the just plain incompetent. Now Google mainly runs on interns, everybody else is too “smart” to do the grunt work like coding, debugging, or much at all beyond getting face time. The reason for this is simple: narcissistic managers whose main talent is claiming credit for the work of their subordinates while punishing anyone who shows initiative, and thus possibly could get promoted. These days at Google, showing skill and dedication is a great way to get a bad review from your manager. Eric and friends seem blissfully unaware of the developing train wreck. by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 25, @07:39PM (#24744501)

Bad PR always is a clear sign for upcoming problems. In this case, there are the privacy concerns about Google Street View:

Don’t expect privacy in your front yard, even if your house is located one mile down a private, dirt road. (PressDemocrat.com)

Also, Google is taking away free dinner. I mean, this is not the worst thing on earth, but still, bad PR, because you can see, that Google is not different from any other company, trying to increase its profits. Also, Google has serious spam problems with Gmail. Also, I noticed that Google Suggest is the default search now – that means, Google seems to care about cuil.com. And so on…

At a T.G.I.F. — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) [...] When a stock was rising as fast as Google’s once was, it was easy to buy the view that there was something truly special about Google. But when the stock is falling, overlooked problems start to loom large. Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft. (New York Times)

I just found a wonderful articale by Nicholas Carr:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

“Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does”

Hi,

We would like to let you know that we have updated our report to include the omitted details. You can read it at: http://ece.uprm.edu/~andre/insert/gmail.html

Also we have made our proof of concept available at: http://ece.uprm.edu/~andre/insert/gmail.tar.gz

Best Regards,

Pablo Ximenes

I love short mails with a clear message

“Google’s chronic silence on all abuse reports makes it impossible to tell whether they’ve taken any action on the problem, whether the problem reports have even made it to the operational staff responsible for the mailservers, or whether they simply don’t care. I’m sure you can all make your own snarky comments re ‘Do no evil’.” (BugTraq)

Don’t forget: Google offers a fast paced and dynamic work environment *rofl*