Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
Testing Chromium: SyzyASAN, a lightweight heap error detector
Monday, May 20, 2013
AddressSanitizer
(ASAN) is a tool for finding memory problems and has been used to find
thousands
of memory errors in Chromium over the last two years. These kinds of errors will typically lead to heap or data corruption and subsequent crashes in random, unrelated code, which make them quite challenging to find and fix without tools like ASAN. However, ASAN is built using
LLVM
/
Clang
and is limited to Mac and Linux builds of Chromium. To address the lack of coverage for Windows-only code, we built SyzyASAN.
SyzyASAN
is built on top of the
Syzygy
toolchain and is an instrumentation-based clone of ASAN for detecting heap errors. It consists of three parts:
An instrumenter that injects instrumentation into binaries produced by the
Microsoft Visual Studio
toolchain.
A run-time library that replaces
malloc, free,
et al.
An
RPC
-based logging server that receives information about detected errors. This lets us get information safely out of sandboxed processes, like Chromium’s renderer.
SyzyASAN operates nearly identically to ASAN, finding errors in the same manner and producing similar reports. SyzyASAN finds some of the hardest-to-locate memory bugs like use-after-free, buffer overruns, and underruns. Focusing on very common memory errors allows SyzyASAN to be relatively efficient.
Although Chrome with SyzyASAN is very usable, the penalties in speed - 4.7x on CPU intensive operations - and memory - a 25% increase plus a fixed 256MB increase in each process - are noticeable so we’ll confine these releases to our Canary channel for now. We’ve been releasing SyzyASAN-instrumented builds to the Windows Canary channel one day each week recently. One day with a little slowdown on the Canary channel gives us plenty of great data. In the last three weeks, we’ve found 150 new bugs in Chromium, several of which could lead to security vulnerabilities.
We’ve put together some
instructions
for instrumenting your local build and debugging issues. Try it out and help us squash more memory bugs. The Syzygy source code and binaries can be downloaded from our
code site
, and instructions for how to use it are on our
wiki
. If you have any questions, suggestions or contributions, feel free to contact
syzygy-team@chromium.org
. If you’re using Syzygy or SyzyASAN with your project we’d love to hear about it!
Posted by Chris Hamilton, Sanitation Engineer
Building efficient apps and extensions with push messaging
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Event pages keep apps and extensions efficient by allowing them to respond to a variety of events such as timers or navigation to a particular site, without having to remain running persistently. But what if you need to respond to something that occurs outside of Chrome, such as a news alert, a message sent to a user or a stock hitting a price threshold? Until now, you had to do this by repeatedly polling a server. This process consumed bandwidth and reduced the battery life of your users’ machines. For a more efficient solution, starting today you can use
Google Cloud Messaging for Chrome
(GCM) - across all channels of Chrome.
GCM will be familiar to developers who have used
Google Cloud Messaging for Android
. To send a message, all you need to do is:
Request a token (channel ID) via
chrome.pushMessaging.getChannelId()
.
Pass the returned token to your server.
Whenever you need to send a message to your app or extension, post the message along with the token to the GCM server-side API.
Your message is then delivered in near real time to Chrome. This makes your event page wake up (if it’s not already running), and the message is delivered to your
chrome.pushMessaging.onMessage
listener.
To use GCM, your users must be signed into Chrome, as the service relies on an efficient push channel that’s only established for signed-in users. Messages are automatically delivered to all the devices where the user has signed in and installed your app/extension.
To add GCM to your app/extension, take a look at the
overview
of the service or start with some of the
sample apps
—and start pushing!
Posted by Mark Scott, Product Manager
Integrate Chrome with your iOS app
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
As an iOS app developer, when your users want to access web content, you currently have two options: create your own in-app web browser frame, or send users away from your app to a browser.
With Chrome’s
OpenInChromeController class with x-callback
, users can open a web page in Chrome and then return to your app with just one tap.
In the example below, a YouTube user has opened a link in Chrome. “YouTube” is prominently displayed in Chrome’s back button. Touching “YouTube” returns the user to the YouTube app.
After you've downloaded the OpenInChromeController class and added it to your project, you’ll be able to check if Chrome is installed, and if so, send links to Chrome with or without x-callback enabled. Additionally, you can specify whether or not to open a new tab when sending a link to Chrome. For a deeper dive and to download the code, check out our
developer docs
.
Posted by Michele Aiello, Software Engineer and Callback Captain
Preview the new Chrome packaged apps
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
A few months ago, we announced the
developer preview
of
Chrome packaged apps
and the Chrome App Launcher. That preview enabled you to to upload your Chrome packaged apps to the Chrome Web Store and test the app install flow. However, a Chrome packaged app was discoverable only if you had a direct link to it, not via searching and browsing the store.
Starting today Chrome packaged apps will be
available in the Chrome Web Store
for anyone on Chrome's
developer channel
on Windows and Chrome OS. You will notice that the “App” category now contains only the new Chrome packaged apps. A new category, called “Websites”, contains all existing
hosted apps
and
legacy packaged apps
.
.
Many of these apps are works in progress, which is why we’re only making them easily available on Chrome’s dev channel. If you’ve written a packaged app, or are working on one, now is a great time to get some early feedback and polish your app before Chrome packaged apps become more broadly available.
A number of developers have taken advantage of the early preview to publish apps that demonstrate the new powerful capabilities of the packaged apps platform. If you're looking for inspiration, we've highlighted a few of them for you to try out in the
Web Store’s Apps category
. If you’re not sure whether a Chrome packaged app is right for you, you can learn more at our developer site:
developer.chrome.com/apps
. As always, we welcome your feedback on our
G+ Developers page
or our developer forum.
Posted by Amanda Bishop, Product manager and (web) store keeper
Chrome 27 Beta: A Speedier Web and New HTML5 Forms
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Today we launched Chrome 27 on the
Beta channel
. This release introduces smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling and a few new features for web developers. Unless otherwise noted, updates apply to desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome for Android.
Faster page loads
Web content now appears on screen
5% faster
(on average) thanks to changes in Chrome’s resource scheduler. Starting with this release, the scheduler is more aggressive about using an idle connection and demoting the priority of preloaded resources so that they don’t interfere with critical assets. We’ve also added
Speed Index
values from
webpagetest.org
to the list of metrics we use to measure improvements in page load time.
Elegant HTML5 date and time <input> forms
The month, week, and date <input> types now feature a simple, elegant user interface on desktop versions of Chrome, as shown in these screenshots from the datalist
demo page
:
Live audio input to Web Audio API
Starting in today’s Beta, you can use
live audio as input to the Web Audio API
for extremely low-latency local audio manipulation and playback. When combined with the recent hook up of Web Audio and WebRTC PeerConnection, it enables analysis and manipulation of the input signal to WebRTC. For now this feature is only available on Mac and Windows.
Sync FileSystem API for Chrome Apps
The
Sync FileSystem API
is a new offline storage API for
Chrome Packaged Apps
which automatically synchronizes stored data across clients via Google Drive. The files are stored in private sandboxes and can be manipulated with the HTML5
File API
and
FileSystem API
. To play with the code, check out the
API spec
and
syncfs-editor
sample app.
DevTools updates
Dock-to-right supports vertical split view, and you can now right-click resources in the Network tab to “Copy as cURL”. The network panel has been improved as well: you can now customize what columns are shown, including the new “domain” one. Finally, console messages can be filtered by source and
impl-side painting
events are properly displayed in the timeline.
Other web platform features in this release
Unprefixed support for the
allowfullscreen
attribute for <iframe> allows embedded video players like YouTube’s to go fullscreen.
The User-Agent field is
now
sent in WebSocket opening handshake headers.
The
ch CSS unit
can be used to match the width and spacing of the "0"-glyph in the current font.
The
'X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff' HTTP response header
now
blocks
script that's served with a content type other than one of the few we recognize as executable.
Visit
chromestatus.com
for a complete overview of Chrome’s developer features, and circle
+Google Chrome Developers
for more frequent updates.
Posted by Kinuko Yasuda, Software Engineer and Super Sync-er
Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
WebKit
is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of
KHTML
in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium's
rendering engine
back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.
However, Chromium uses a different
multi-process architecture
than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing
Blink
, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.
This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.
In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.
Throughout this transition, we’ll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem. In that spirit, we’ve set
strong guidelines for new features
that emphasize standards, interoperability, conformance testing and transparency.
To learn more about Blink visit our
project page
.
Posted by Adam Barth, Software Engineer
Discover Chrome DevTools - Our new interactive course
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Today, we are launching
Discover DevTools
, an interactive
Code School
training course that will teach you how to take advantage of Chrome DevTool's powerful suite of resources and speed up the development and debugging of your web apps.
In each of the seven chapters of this interactive course, you can watch an overview video teaching you the latest techniques, and follow a series of challenges where your knowledge will be put to the test. We've integrated the Chrome DevTools themselves into the course, so as you explore the functionality within them, you'll get immediate feedback and earn points and badges.
Even regular users of the
Chrome DevTools
may be surprised to find some lesser-known features from this course that can really boost productivity. You'll learn a debugging workflow to go from an uncaught exception to a live fix without ever refreshing your app. In addition, the course will share time-saving tricks to improve your efficiency while debugging CSS, improving reflow issues, and interpreting your network and JavaScript bottlenecks. You'll also uncover the DOM bottlenecks that are blocking you from delivering a slick 60 FPS experience.
We hope you’ll
try out the Discover DevTools course
and see how Chrome DevTools can make you a more productive developer.
Posted by Paul Irish, Senior Developer Advocate (completed the course in 14:52) and Peter Lubbers, Program Manager (best time: 15:05)
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