In May 2020, Microsoft released its latest significant update for Windows 10. As an unfortunate side effect of the May 2020 Windows 10 update, some users have reported notable issues with the Google Chrome browser.
Following an update to Windows 10’s May 2020 version, some users across Reddit and Google’sHelpForums have noted that the browser has stopped syncing and reverts to a signed-out state upon a reboot. This doesn’t affect bookmarks but it would affect the data you back up to your Google account for the sake of syncing to smartphones or other computers.
The text that is displayed in the URL dropdown. Can contain XML-style markup for styling. The supported tags are 'url' (for a literal URL), 'match' (for highlighting text that matched what the user's query), and 'dim' (for dim helper text). And Relax: Bug Fixed. The good news is that Google say the bug has been fixed and pushed out to the stable builds of Chrome for Mac (presumably beta and dev versions were either unaffected or also patched). To check you’re up to date head to Chrome Settings About Chrome and look for a version number matching 41.0.2272.104 (or later).
Further, and perhaps most annoyingly, this issue is also deleting cookies off of the machine. With that, websites treat that Chrome browser as a fresh install, asking users to sign in every time they reboot their machine.
As pointed out by TechDows, Google has actually been aware of these issues with Chrome since before the Windows 10 May update was released. A Chromium bug report from April details Google’s knowledge of the problem, and a full two months later the company is still investigating the problem.
Update 10/12: Nearly four months after we first reported on this problem, it’s still happening. Some users are still encountering issues on the latest versions of Windows while using Chrome and it seems that Google and Microsoft have no clear solution in sight.
Luckily, a new workaround has appeared that seems to fix the problem as well as revealing its potential source. Unearthed by TechDows, a user commented on a Chromium thread to point out that an “S4U” task in the Windows Task Scheduler seems to cause Chrome to dump passwords and other data. Microsoft explains what an “S4U” task is in more detail here, but the long story short is that it allows the computer to run tasks as a local system account. The user explains:
This is because the RPC that UBPM uses to create the S4U token can sometimes delete your saved credentials in lsass. Amongst other things, your saved credentials (or rather, the hash of them) are used to generate your DPAPI user encryption key, and when they’re deleted lsass just uses the hash of the empty string (!!).
Frankly, that’s way over my head, but other users on the thread report back that disabling these S4U tasks fixes the problem. Notably, at least one Microsoft engineer responded to the comment to say that they are looking into this solution. To try it out for yourself, open a PowerShell window as an administrator and paste the command below. Then, delete any tasks it lists from the Task Scheduler.
Get-ScheduledTask | foreach { If (([xml](Export-ScheduledTask -TaskName $_.TaskName -TaskPath $_.TaskPath)).GetElementsByTagName(“LogonType”).’#text’ -eq “S4U”) { $_.TaskName } }
If you’re being affected by this frustrating issue, give it a shot!
The original article follows.
If you’re a Chrome user on Windows 10, it’s probably best to avoid the May update — version 2004 — until things get patched up. You can do so by going to Settings > Update & Security > Pause Updates. There, you can pause any Windows 10 updates for up to 35 days. In my case, I really hope that means Google has this patched up before July 2nd.
Notably, there is one potential workaround that Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy figured out. He explains:
If you look in Event Viewer, under Windows Logs > Applications and Services > Microsoft > Windows > Crypto-DPAPI > Operational, do you see any errors? If the answer is yes, try this:
- Close all Chrome Windows
- Lock (Press Win+L) your Workstation
- Unlock, then start Chrome, does it work then?
If you’re affected, drop a comment below and let us know if this workaround patches things up (temporarily, at least) for you. There’s a good chance, too, that other Chromium-based browsers could be affected by this as well. As Windows Latest points out, other apps affected by this bug include Microsoft’s own Mail and OneDrive apps.
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Google Chrome has fixed a bug that enabled antivirus programs on Windows 10 to lock newly created files.
The patching of the bug means antivirus programs running on Windows would no longer block new files generated by the Chrome web browser, such as bookmarks.
Antivirus programs briefly lock new files
As a safety precaution, oftentimes antivirus programs temporarily lock newly generated files on a system until these can be scanned and ruled out for malicious activity.
On Windows 10 machines, in particular, this created issues for the Google Chrome web browser when it would use `ImportantFileWriter` to output certain files.
'Anti-virus programs and other scanners may briefly lock new files which can lead to frequent problems with saving bookmarks and other files that use the ImportantFileWriter,' explained Bruce Dawson, a Google engineer.
This meant Windows 10 users would experience issues trying to save bookmarks, for example, due to the web browser having difficulty creating the corresponding file.
As first reported by Windows Latestthis week, a recent enhancement made by the Chromium project lets the Chrome web browser run smoothly on Windows 10, even when antivirus tools are enabled.
Fix attempts file creation multiple times
The fix published to Chromium's Google Source codebase resolves this bug by retrying the execution of ReplaceFile method multiple times to overcome the possible race condition in which an antivirus program takes control of (and locks) a file being simultaneously accessed by Chrome.
The code change also has a machine learning aspect to it which means, over time Chromium will teach itself to fine-tune the number of attempts needed to bypass such race conditions.
'This change also adds instrumentation to record how many retries are needed, for future tuning,' stated Dawson.
The engineer also states this bug only impacts Windows systems which is why the fix made into important_file_writer.cc was specific to Windows OS, as shown in the screenshot above (line 45).
Since the fix has been merged into the repository as of December 30, 2020, it is expected the next version of Google Chrome will come shipped with it.
Chrome users should keep an eye out for any upcoming releases and ensure they update their web browsers promptly.
Help+manual Bug Chrome For Mac Catalina
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