WTF, Chromium?

Rae Knowler

16 Jan 2016, 10:13 p.m.

Chromium, like Chrome, runs Google's A-B trials (or Field Trials) on users' computers. This is what happened when one of those locked up my machine without warning.

The problem

I was working at the office the other day when I noticed my computer (running Linux Mint 17.1) had suddenly become very slow. Typing into PhpStorm or Slack lagged by a second or more, windows being dragged across the desktop would suddenly refuse to go any further, the terminal stopped responding at all — in short, I couldn't get anything done at all. After closing and/or restarting a couple of 'usual suspect' programs with no effect, I ran top and discovered about five Chromium tasks bouncing around at the head of the list.

It looked something like this.

I only had one open Chromium window, which I shut. The computer breathed a sigh of relief and started working at its normal speed. Unfortunately, a web browser was pretty vital for the work I was trying to do (and besides, I was curious). Reopening Chromium and running ps ax | grep chromium showed me the following:

A whole mess of Chromium processes, most of which have the option --force-field-trials=AutofillClas.

The cause

Force field trials? That sounded a bit off. Googling got me to this Ghacks article, which told me:

Google is well known for the experiments that it likes to conduct in regards to the company's products. The company usually tests new features and changes to its products by enabling them for a fraction of the product's user base. ... The Chromium and Chrome developers call these experiments Field Trials.

So, Google had randomly decided to make my computer unusable for an A-B trial. Great. (Presumed question: how many users will we lose if we do this?)

Ghacks had information on how to randomise your group in a field trial, but none on how to disable them completely. Apparently even Chromium developers can't do that. Searching on the Linux Mint forums turned up nothing useful except, weirdly, a post about exactly my problem that had been deleted without answers. It was posted on the 15th December, a good three weeks before my issues started, which means no one in the mean time had considered this behaviour a good reason to stop the field trial.

There is a command line switch to disable field trial tests configured in fieldtrial_testing_config.json. By this time, though, I wanted to opt out entirely. I didn't want to kill off AutofillClas, only to wait like a sitting duck for the next time Google decided that dozens of dancing Chromium processes might enhance my user experience.

A series of irritations

Isn't Chromium supposed to be the version of Chrome with less Google integration? This seemed like a bug to me, albeit a deliberate one, and I wasn't alone in that. I found this especially annoying since I'd only recently reinstalled Chromium, after Firefox, too, started eating CPU for no good reason and became unusable. (I tried isolating extensions in case one of them was causing the trouble, with no luck.)

My partner suggested I try Opera. It downloaded all right from the package manager but then simply failed to work. I did not have the investment to bother debugging it.

SeaMonkey looked promising and ran fine, but it has no compatible JSON-formatting plugin, which was a dealbreaker.

Iridium: a solution?

In a Linux Mint forum thread about a different Chromium issue, someone recommends Iridium as a Chromium fork with better security and privacy. Field trials aren't specifically mentioned in the comparison between the two browsers, but it seems very unlikely that Google's field trials would run on Iridium. I'm currently trying it out and it hasn't exploded yet.

I did, however, have the same problem installing it as another poster in that thread. Adding the repository via the command line, as suggested in the official downloads page, had no effect. I had to add it via the Synaptic Package Manager. To do that, go to Settings > Repositories, select Additional Repositories and then Add a New Repository. Paste this into the url box, replacing 'trusty' with the appropriate name for your version of Linux Mint or Ubuntu:

deb https://downloads.iridiumbrowser.de/ubuntu trusty main

Conclusion

I am trying to come up with a better title and conclusion for this post than, "WTF, Chromium?" but not getting very far. This issue wasted half a morning of my time and, judging from the Chromium developers' attitude to it, will waste time for plenty of other people down the line.

Bar7 Nov 2017, 11:26 p.m.Vivaldi browser, same engine, different chrome ontop with old Opera configurability, and Google stuff out.
john7 Nov 2017, 11:50 p.m.Just another example of our Tech Overlords treating their users with disdain. You see it everywhere: surveillance, devices with features that benefit the company and hurt the consumer, no accountability, censorship... the list goes on. At some point we all need to step back and acknowledge that it isn't about being "a product" - it is complete and utter disdain for the end-user.
JL8 Nov 2017, 12:45 a.m.Would you rather that they release this feature to everyone at the same time, and so everyones pcs lock up? Your choices here are either - be the guinea pig for a very miniscule set of features; probably something like one in a thousand, if not less. Or be the guinea pig for every single feature if they're not allowed to do gradual release. Would you truly prefer the latter?
RW8 Nov 2017, 2:07 a.m.@JL, The problem here is not about contributing or not to the field trials. The problem is that, chromium locked his workstation. With this, you are forced to opt-out from it so you can continue using the workstation and continue working.
bh8 Nov 2017, 9:21 a.m.@JL, The problem is, tests should be opt-in, not opt-out.
Martin8 Nov 2017, 9:35 a.m.I just wanted to say, thanks, my computer started doing this a few days ago and I thought it was dying, It got to the point my whole computer froze. It didn't do that since but still, it was a little unsettling to have my whole computer slowly freeze, even after I shut off chrome it still had an effect.
Mangat8 Nov 2017, 10:04 a.m.Not even Chromium, for me even Firefox has got slower. Basically I believe current days webbrowsers want to support so many features, platforms that they no longer can manage performance. You might want to try min browser. Very minimalistic.
willc14 Nov 2017, 9:35 p.m.Firefox Quantum came out today, and it is spectacular.
Touss21 Nov 2017, 1:34 p.m.I'm dying with the same issue. The laptop is completely unusable because Google has decided that their field trials are more important than my work. I was seeing client and embarrassed myself when the Chrome froze the entire laptop wasting my time and the client time. @JL: yes, let them send the thing to everyone so they can embarrass themselves. Probably after that they will learn to write better software before releasing it. I just read a report today on quartz.com where Google collects users' locations even if you've disabled the location services and you have no sim card inserted. All it needs is a working internet connection. All this without the user's consent. So yeah, either they get it right or the quit the software business. How about those choices? I want the choice to refuse participating in a trial that makes my system unusable. It didn't buy a laptop to be Google's guinea pig.
Rae24 Nov 2017, 10:22 a.m.Update: I updated Firefox to Quantum yesterday and so far, admittedly after only a few hours' experience, I'm very happy with it. I prefer Firefox over Chrome philosophically, and there are several features that work much better on it for me. (For example, address autocomplete based on history - Chrome just forgets about all the addresses I might want to go to and seems to remember only the ones I'm no longer interested in!) I've had the field trials issue twice more since writing this blog post, which is three times too many for me.
codywohlers10 Mar 2018, 7:06 p.m.Came across your page while investigating my chrome (and chromium) in top continuously launch and kill new child processes while just idling on a simple webpage. Each child process as a --field-trial-handle argument so who knows whats going on. Time to uninstall...
dave13 Mar 2018, 8:28 p.m.Yeah like others Googled and found your page. Looking at HTOP I see 26 different pids with --field-trial-handle in it. Have just downloaded Iridium. One thing I've noticed and maybe they're testing to see how much of their bullshit I'll take before uninstalling... is all the reCaptchas I fail twice THEN it takes. Also something is going on which causes LastPast to log me out every so often.
dave13 Mar 2018, 8:40 p.m.Nah... scratch off Iridium... seeing the same --Field trial bs in htop see screen shot at hxxps://imgur.com/a/fzPib Sure not as many but still enough.
Another nerd5 Feb 2019, 11:10 p.m.On Linux, I've had success with a node/bash program to kill any chrome processes with the field trial handle flag on it to great success (runs about 400mb lighter). Explaining is out of scope, gonna have to Google it ([your shell program] find pid by flags | kill process by flags). Hope this helps, google annoyed me for a week before I decided to put it in its place. Remember people, YOUR the admin, not GOOGLE. So use Google to figure out how to control them (lol)

Bar7 Nov 2017, 11:26 p.m.Vivaldi browser, same engine, different chrome ontop with old Opera configurability, and Google stuff out.

john7 Nov 2017, 11:50 p.m.Just another example of our Tech Overlords treating their users with disdain. You see it everywhere: surveillance, devices with features that benefit the company and hurt the consumer, no accountability, censorship... the list goes on. At some point we all need to step back and acknowledge that it isn't about being "a product" - it is complete and utter disdain for the end-user.

JL8 Nov 2017, 12:45 a.m.Would you rather that they release this feature to everyone at the same time, and so everyones pcs lock up? Your choices here are either - be the guinea pig for a very miniscule set of features; probably something like one in a thousand, if not less. Or be the guinea pig for every single feature if they're not allowed to do gradual release. Would you truly prefer the latter?

RW8 Nov 2017, 2:07 a.m.@JL, The problem here is not about contributing or not to the field trials. The problem is that, chromium locked his workstation. With this, you are forced to opt-out from it so you can continue using the workstation and continue working.

bh8 Nov 2017, 9:21 a.m.@JL, The problem is, tests should be opt-in, not opt-out.

Martin8 Nov 2017, 9:35 a.m.I just wanted to say, thanks, my computer started doing this a few days ago and I thought it was dying, It got to the point my whole computer froze. It didn't do that since but still, it was a little unsettling to have my whole computer slowly freeze, even after I shut off chrome it still had an effect.

Mangat8 Nov 2017, 10:04 a.m.Not even Chromium, for me even Firefox has got slower. Basically I believe current days webbrowsers want to support so many features, platforms that they no longer can manage performance. You might want to try min browser. Very minimalistic.

willc14 Nov 2017, 9:35 p.m.Firefox Quantum came out today, and it is spectacular.

Touss21 Nov 2017, 1:34 p.m.I'm dying with the same issue. The laptop is completely unusable because Google has decided that their field trials are more important than my work. I was seeing client and embarrassed myself when the Chrome froze the entire laptop wasting my time and the client time. @JL: yes, let them send the thing to everyone so they can embarrass themselves. Probably after that they will learn to write better software before releasing it. I just read a report today on quartz.com where Google collects users' locations even if you've disabled the location services and you have no sim card inserted. All it needs is a working internet connection. All this without the user's consent. So yeah, either they get it right or the quit the software business. How about those choices? I want the choice to refuse participating in a trial that makes my system unusable. It didn't buy a laptop to be Google's guinea pig.

Rae24 Nov 2017, 10:22 a.m.Update: I updated Firefox to Quantum yesterday and so far, admittedly after only a few hours' experience, I'm very happy with it. I prefer Firefox over Chrome philosophically, and there are several features that work much better on it for me. (For example, address autocomplete based on history - Chrome just forgets about all the addresses I might want to go to and seems to remember only the ones I'm no longer interested in!) I've had the field trials issue twice more since writing this blog post, which is three times too many for me.

codywohlers10 Mar 2018, 7:06 p.m.Came across your page while investigating my chrome (and chromium) in top continuously launch and kill new child processes while just idling on a simple webpage. Each child process as a --field-trial-handle argument so who knows whats going on. Time to uninstall...

dave13 Mar 2018, 8:28 p.m.Yeah like others Googled and found your page. Looking at HTOP I see 26 different pids with --field-trial-handle in it. Have just downloaded Iridium. One thing I've noticed and maybe they're testing to see how much of their bullshit I'll take before uninstalling... is all the reCaptchas I fail twice THEN it takes. Also something is going on which causes LastPast to log me out every so often.

dave13 Mar 2018, 8:40 p.m.Nah... scratch off Iridium... seeing the same --Field trial bs in htop see screen shot at hxxps://imgur.com/a/fzPib Sure not as many but still enough.

Another nerd5 Feb 2019, 11:10 p.m.On Linux, I've had success with a node/bash program to kill any chrome processes with the field trial handle flag on it to great success (runs about 400mb lighter). Explaining is out of scope, gonna have to Google it ([your shell program] find pid by flags | kill process by flags). Hope this helps, google annoyed me for a week before I decided to put it in its place. Remember people, YOUR the admin, not GOOGLE. So use Google to figure out how to control them (lol)