Russian search engine, browser, and web portal Yandex has directly accused chip giant AMD of favoring Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome when rolling out Windows drivers. In a blog post, the software company says AMD sends out graphics drivers to Chromium browsers (Chrome and Edge) that crash less than drivers sent to non-Chromium browsers.
Yandex offers a breakdown in a blog post on Habr (Google-translated to English):
“Once our team encountered a bug: on Lenovo laptops in Yandex Browser, scrolling web pages from the touchpad was too sharp, but in other browsers (Chrome and Edge) this problem was not observed.
After looking at the code, we realized that our touchpad event handling logic does not differ from the open source Chromium, on which both our browser and Google Chrome are based. So the problem was somewhere else.”
In fact, Yandex says that AMD drivers crash five times less and take 8% less memory on average when they detect a “chrome.exe” file compared to “browser.exe”.
Findings
The firm published its findings and the graph below shows the results. Specifically, the black line shows the number of crashes on a non-Chromium browser. The lie in red shows how much crashes reduce when detecting the chrome EXE.
It seems this is something AMD is doing on purpose because changing the “browser.exe” file to “chrome.exe” results in less crashes and better memory loss, essentially tricking the Windows driver into thinking it is installing on a Chromium browser.
“For the sake of interest, we tried to rename the executable file of our browser from browser.exe to chrome.exe – and voila! Jumps during scrolling have been fixed. Probably, in the touchpad drivers, a certain list of application file names was “hardcoded”, for which the fix for this problem was applied.”
Yandex says it has made direct contact with AMD to highlight the findings.
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