Google Chrome Distributed Reliability Testing

Having released Chrome 2.0.167.0 the past week, Google also delivered an insight into how it managed to ensure a high degree of stability for its browser. Pamela Greene and Patrick Johnson, Google software engineers, indicated that the end purpose of building a stable Chrome was that the browser should not crash, irrespective of the websites surfed by the end user or the actions performed. Ensuring that this scenario is a reality is a Google system dubbed “distributed reliability testing.”

“One of the advantages to being associated with Google is that we have access to a lot of information about the Web, and a lot of computers to test on. About once an hour, our distributed test infrastructure takes the very latest version of Google Chrome in development and uses it to automatically load a large number of the pages that Google has seen are most popular around the world,” Johnson and Greene stated.

According to Google results extracted from the “distributed reliability testing” system, the latest development milestones of the browser performed well against the top 5000 websites worldwide, with a success rate of 499, 463 without the sandbox. Still, the volume of websites tested with Chrome is more consistent than the top 500 www destinations. Before making available Dev, Beta, or Stable channel releases of Chrome, Google tests over 100,000 pages with its browser.

“In addition, we "fuzz-test" the user interface, automatically performing arbitrary sequences of actions (opening a new tab, pressing the spacebar, opening various dialogs, etc. — a total of more than 30 possible actions). These are also run in our distributed testing architecture, so we can exercise thousands of combinations for each new version of Google Chrome in progress,” Johnson and Greene added.

The Mountain View-based search giant is indicating that large-scale testing is designed to catch up errors and to identify crashes that are nothing more than exceptions, but still relevant to the end users. The purpose is to prevent Chrome from crashing in real-life scenarios, by combing and filtering potential issues through automatic testing.

The latest release of Google Chrome is available for download here.