Chrome 52

Yesterday Google release version 52 of their Chrome web browser to a stable branch and started pushing it out to everyone who uses Chrome. Usually I do not notice this, and wait to update my Chrome until those 3 little bars turn red. Yesterday evening the first of our customers starting seeing the results of this update: a less than functional product. I found out about the issue through our customer relationship manager this morning. After the usual attempts to reproduce the issue which only occurred on Chrome on a Mac with Chrome on my Mac, I informed him that it couldn't be reproduced.

At this juncture in many a bug report, there isn't a whole lot further to go on. A bug that can't be reproduced can't really be fixed - indeed, how would you even know if you did? But we had a time for the occurance of the bug, so I was able to check the logs for differences between her machine, where the bug happened, and my machine, where it didn't. Same operating system. Same version of that system. Same browser - Chrome, just as had been reported. But I was running Chrome version 51 and she was running version 52. However, my Chrome browser didn't have any updates available. Consulting the Chrome blog I learned when version 52 had been released (the night before) and that it was slowly being rolled out to browsers.

Other people in the office were also currently running version 51 just like me and didn't have the update available yet either. So I started a guessing game about what the possible issues might be. A syntax error that had slipped through and this new version of Chrome was stricter and caught it? Unlikely because I used a linter to check all the Javascript. A bug introduced into this new version of Chrome that broke an edge case appearing in our website's code? Possible, but not super likely and no way to test until I got the update. One of the libraries among our dependencies having an issue I settled on as the most likely possibility.

So I set out to research where our Javascript dependencies might have fallen behind to the point of breaking. Since it was only happening in one part of the application this limited the scope of the search to Javascript libraries used there. It's funny. Updating some things *cough* jQuery *cough* breaks things but failing to update others leads to breakage when browsers remove deprecated features.

The whole idea of servers transmitting code out to thousands of different possible OS/browser/extension combinations and expecting the code to be run there correctly is one of the ludicrous foundations the internet is built on. That's why when I learned to build webpages we built two versions: one to run javascript, and one to present static content for browsers where javascript was turned off. I was one of those people who had it turned off. For years. It was an unnecessary security risk. But that was before AJAX...

After formulating my theories I moved on to other issues for the day, until someone else in the office found the update available and clued me in. I checked my Chrome for the update. It was there. So I pulled the plug and restarted Chrome. This is no small task because I'm usually logged in to about a dozen services which I've set up to require 2-factor authentication. I've been really serious about implementing that level of security ever since PatientFocus hacked my LinkedIn account. Sure enough, the issue appeared right away and I was quickly able to isolate the library responsible and upgrade it.

This got me thinking about the web: what it was created to be and what it has become. HTML was supposed to be a way to make text files link to other text files and binary files (like images) for the organization of information. It was designed in an incredibly durable way and useful links were soon duplicated all over the web so that the removal of any one page would not cut them off from the web. Then came Javascript so we could run code to do things on and interact with those web pages. And then CSS to simplify styling them. Google's fundamental insight was that the value was in the links. But look what this ecosystem has become. Information useful and accessible on Tuesday can be rendered inaccessible by Thursday simply by a single browser, albiet the most popular, changing the way they handle Javascript. This is not a way to stably preserve information through the ages. The web today is as fleeting as a boomtown newspaper in the Old West. That is, without people like yours truly to keep updating things whole areas quickly become ghost towns. Is that the way it should be?

And so castles made of sand melt into the sea. Eventually. . .

Also, today my Grandma turned 90. This woman has been an inspiration to my parents, myself, and my children. I hope she endures to inspire my grandchildren.