Chrome crashed again (which is still notable). At least it claimed to have crashed, and in three (well, two and a half) different ways.

That it brought up the debugger is probably a Windows thing, seems unnecessary to me given that the notification in Chrome is much more clear – and much less scary for the average user. A plug-in has died. And guess which one it was this time? Well, the same one as last time. Shockwave bloody Flash.

Chrome of course continued just fine, the only thing wrong was that where there should have been an embedded Flash video, there was instead the Sad Plugin indicator:

Chrome is still brilliant, but this isn’t the way to notify your user that something is wrong, just the yellow bar, and perhaps the small pop-up (and don’t say “Unknown” in one window, when the other window clearly knows what it is) – but certainly not the debugger.

What would my mum do with that? Nothing, it would just serve as a confusing distraction, when very little has really gone wrong. It might just be Visual Studio trying to be helpful of course, so perhaps the vast majority of people wouldn’t see the debugger window –  but I really don’t see a lot of crashes, so I don’t know if some other debugger would appear instead – maybe Dr Watson? Does that still exist?

(Any debugger, by whatever name, would be equally useless for 99.9% of users, so what’s the point, really?)

By the way, your eyes aren’t deceiving you – that is Windows XP in the shots above, my shiny new (Dell Precision running Vista 64) workstation will be here in a couple of weeks I guess, but for now I’m still using this (still quite reliable) old thing. Doesn’t hold a candle to the Vista 64 machine at home of course.

Vista really is good stuff. (Don’t believe the anti-hype, seriously.)