Is Chromium safe?

[MagicPoulp]

Probably because they try to do very unstable things with the graphics card. And certain graphics card or drivers would not support it.

Chrome got a lot of popularity because it was known to be faster than other browsers.

[shep]

Maybe Chromium is save, but why then did it freeze my system like I described in a earlier post? Chrome didn't do that ever, just Firefox and only once.

You may be able to mitigate some of this behavior. Under settings Advanced: Disable anything that sends data to Google/Web services, web cam access, microphone access, resolution of navigation errors, payment methods, content settings, and the ability to run background apps when chrome is closed.

The iridium project essentially tries to remove all these features from chromium source.

https://iridiumbrowser.de/

Unfortunately, they develop deb packages in Ubuntu and the debian packages have not worked, without backporting libfontconfig, for some time.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

...which includes `rm -rf`

How can such a system be considered secured?

Security is assured by APT's insistence on authenticating the repositories: https://wiki.debian.org/SecureApt

This is in contrast to, for example, Arch Linux wherein the AUR packages can be installed without any checks at all.

[No_windows]

My thought exactly! How can one program freeze a whole system in this day and age?

I assume by tying up resources... that happens on my old laptop all the time. Sometimes it's only the browser, other times everything stalls.

[MagicPoulp]

...which includes `rm -rf`

How can such a system be considered secured?

Security is assured by APT's insistence on authenticating the repositories: https://wiki.debian.org/SecureApt

This is in contrast to, for example, Arch Linux wherein the AUR packages can be installed without any checks at all.

Install scripts or scriptlets are not always used. I don't udnerstand why there is not an option to install packages while disabling install scripts, or making sure no install scripts is used.

On Windows, a program install cannot do whatever it wants ever with root priviledges (UAC). Sorry for the reference to Windows. Maybe I don't understand why it must be the way it is on linux.

[debiandonder]

My thought exactly! How can one program freeze a whole system in this day and age?

I assume by tying up resources... that happens on my old laptop all the time. Sometimes it's only the browser, other times everything stalls.

That is true and I have had that before. When the browser started acting up and consumed all my 8 gigs of RAM and started to use the SWAP file. Everything slowed down to slow motion. I was able to close the program in the system monitor and everything returned to normal.

The last incident I had was with Chromium 72, latest version in the Debian repository. IT completely froze everything solid. Later I switched to Chrome 73 and no problem.

I am using the latest version of Firefox 65 now and so far so good.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Install scripts or scriptlets are not always used. I don't udnerstand why there is not an option to install packages while disabling install scripts, or making sure no install scripts is used.

Because any install scripts that are provided are usually necessary for the package to work correctly.

And as I already mentioned systemd unit files can also be used maliciously and will be enabled and started automatically by APT so that wouldn't remove the risk completely.

On Windows, a program install cannot do whatever it wants ever with root priviledges (UAC).

That's because Windows users don't have official package repositories from which software can be safely installed so they end up downloading software from random websites, which is *very* risky indeed. And I think most users just click away the UAC crap without even reading it...

Maybe I don't understand why it must be the way it is on linux.

UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.

[debiandonder]

Great! Debian 9 froze again today and this time it was 0 A.D. Last week it was chromium.

Solid freeze, no input devices work.

Ubuntu did not freeze that much.

Simple setup, with no graphics card and only using opensource drivers.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

https://packages.debian.org/stretch/memtester?

Sounds like a hardware problem to me.

Or mixed sources.

[stevepusser]

Maybe Chromium is save, but why then did it freeze my system like I described in a earlier post? Chrome didn't do that ever, just Firefox and only once.

You may be able to mitigate some of this behavior. Under settings Advanced: Disable anything that sends data to Google/Web services, web cam access, microphone access, resolution of navigation errors, payment methods, content settings, and the ability to run background apps when chrome is closed.

The iridium project essentially tries to remove all these features from chromium source.

https://iridiumbrowser.de/

Unfortunately, they develop deb packages in Ubuntu and the debian packages have not worked, without backporting libfontconfig, for some time.

The MX 17 Linux version is built on and should work with vanilla Stretch, ASFAIK:

http://mxrepo.com/mx/repo/pool/main/i/iridium-browser/

You can see from the size of the source why I'm a bit reluctant to burden the OBS with a separate build, but anyone else is welcome to give it a go. It needs a lot of RAM to build, I seem to remember--the OBS uses eight threads by default.

[debiandonder]

https://packages.debian.org/stretch/memtester?

Sounds like a hardware problem to me.

Or mixed sources.

The thing is that both programs that froze my system came from the Debian stable repository. I will try the 0 A.D. from he backports version that's more up to date.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

It won't matter which program you run if the problem is a broken memory chip.

[debiandonder]

It won't matter which program you run if the problem is a broken memory chip.

Might be, but it doesn't seem to be broken when I use Chrome instead of Chromium.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Faults caused by broken memory chips are intermittent in nature, run the memtester program to which I linked earlier.

[debiandonder]

Faults caused by broken memory chips are intermittent in nature, run the memtester program to which I linked earlier.

I installed the memtester program from the package manager, but can't find it anywhere. The previous distro had a boot loader with that function but I only have Debian now and have overwritten Windows 7.

How to I access that program?

[sunrat]

How to I access that program?

https://lmsptfy.com/?q=memtester%20how%20to%20use

[debiandonder]

[MagicPoulp]

What does the syslog say when it freezes?

Since the CPU heat and other factors affect the system failures, you should be ready to run memtester just after your freeze.
-

[stevepusser]

0ad and Chromium can also stress the system, leading to lockups from overheating, so I would monitor your CPU temperatures in real time to see how high they get when running those programs. There are a variety of ways to do this, depending on your desktop and your preferences. I like to have mine in the taskbar--right now it's been at 89C (190F) for a while as I backport various versions of the new Liquorix 5.0 kernel with all cores at 100%.

[MagicPoulp]

Install scripts or scriptlets are not always used. I don't udnerstand why there is not an option to install packages while disabling install scripts, or making sure no install scripts is used.

Because any install scripts that are provided are usually necessary for the package to work correctly.

And as I already mentioned systemd unit files can also be used maliciously and will be enabled and started automatically by APT so that wouldn't remove the risk completely.

On Windows, a program install cannot do whatever it wants ever with root priviledges (UAC).

That's because Windows users don't have official package repositories from which software can be safely installed so they end up downloading software from random websites, which is *very* risky indeed. And I think most users just click away the UAC crap without even reading it...

Maybe I don't understand why it must be the way it is on linux.

UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.

So for the chrome .deb file, I can unpack it and check the scriptlets. And before I update it with apt-get, I can do the same. apt-get has an option -d to just download.

So if one wants to be careful, one can check the scriptlets. So this means chrome does not have full controll over my computer when I use their .deb and their repository for updates. Because I can check the scriptlets.