Sun 29 May, 2011
This blog’s hiatus will be coming to an end shortly, once arrangements have been made to recast it as ‘Brown Hat Security’
Watch this space for more news.
Wed 9 Mar, 2011
Shortly after yesterday’s post, I went to evaluate the NaCl examples given in the gallery link–and noticed that there was a browser update. Having not fully consumed my morning coffee, I allowed the update to proceed, and then found myself in a bit of a quandary–the system was left in a rather unusable state on boot. Login was available but no pages would load; a notice appeared that running the NaCl plugin could hamper security and usability–yes, I think I could figure that out–and even the settings page was unavailable.
I eventually flipped the dev switch to purge the partition and return the system to a usable state.
This performed about as expected: several minutes of staring at a blank screen waiting for it to purge the partition. When I flipped it back and booted back into ChromeOS, it acted like we’d never met–I had to re-take my picture, which was an annoyance–but signing into “the cloud” did begin to have some interesting effects.
It’s worth noting that bookmarks and access to things like saved passwords return right away, but that applications and extensions will take several minutes to repopulate. They do do so, however, fairly quickly, though some of them appeared to lose my settings.
ScribeFire, AdBlock, and bit.ly lost settings or logins. TooManyTabs came back right away; WOT forgot login information, but continued to function in default mode.
So while the recovery method is not quite as seamless as portrayed in the video Google amused us with, it is still fairly solid and ready for prime-time with a couple of caveats:
Number 1, a notification that “Your apps will be here shortly” would not be amiss.
Number 2, having a backup option in crosh to restart the browser in a default mode without extensions for the user would be helpful.