<story><title>How a load-balancing bug led to worldwide Chrome crashes</title><url>http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=165171#c27</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>hammock</author><text>The last discussion was mostly about how the title was linkbait. I want to hear people&apos;s opinions on whether they think it&apos;s appropriate for a browser (Chrome) to be designed such that it doesn&apos;t operate independently- that it can be crashed (or self destruct bug, insert your own word here) by a remote server at any time.&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, Firefox doesn&apos;t do that. Safari doesn&apos;t do that. Internet browsers are probably the #1 most important app on a computer these days, browser reliability is vital.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DannyBee</author><text>Chrome Sync is, AFAIK, not a push service.  
Something polled a Google server, it returned a bad answer, it crashed the browser.
Why is this important?&lt;p&gt;Because it&apos;s entirely possible that Firefox or Safari, for example, could have been crashed by contacting the safebrowsing server, and the safebrowsing server returning an answer that crashes it.&lt;p&gt;Firefox also does remote firefox update checks and plugin update checks, etc.&lt;p&gt;None of the browsers you mention are &quot;independent&quot; of internet servers anymore.  They are meant to function independently, as is Chrome, but exactly the right remote bug could likely crash all of them.</text></comment>
<story><title>How a load-balancing bug led to worldwide Chrome crashes</title><url>http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=165171#c27</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>hammock</author><text>The last discussion was mostly about how the title was linkbait. I want to hear people&apos;s opinions on whether they think it&apos;s appropriate for a browser (Chrome) to be designed such that it doesn&apos;t operate independently- that it can be crashed (or self destruct bug, insert your own word here) by a remote server at any time.&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, Firefox doesn&apos;t do that. Safari doesn&apos;t do that. Internet browsers are probably the #1 most important app on a computer these days, browser reliability is vital.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maggit</author><text>It&apos;s a crash bug. Bugs happen.&lt;p&gt;It is not a design flaw. Sure, this specific vulnerability would not be there if the remote sync feature wasn&apos;t there, but people like features.&lt;p&gt;Chrome has a pretty good security track record. I&apos;m not worried.</text></comment>