Google left thousands of machines in businesses with broken chrome browsers this week following a silent experimental change. Business users accessing Chrome through virtual machine environments such as Citrix continued to see white screens on open Chrome tabs, blocking access to the browser and leaving it completely unresponsive. This confused many IT administrators on the problem, as businesses typically manage and control Chrome updates.
Following complaints, Google was forced to reveal that it had begun an “experiment” on stable versions of Chrome that changed the browser’s behaviour. The experiment was done quietly, without IT admins or users being warned about Google’s changes. Google flipped the switch to a flag to enable a new web content occlusion feature that is designed to suspend Chrome tabs when you move other apps on top of them and when the browser is not in use Reduce the use of resources.
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In the Chromium bug thread, Google software engineer David Bienvenu reported, “The experiment/flag has been in beta for ~ 5 months.” This is an experiment for static (e.g., m77, m78) that Chrome released on Tuesday morning Was pushed through. Previously, it had been on for about a percentage of M77 and M78 users for a month with no reports of issues, unfortunately. “
Google rolled back the changes on late Thursday night, following several reports from businesses with thousands of affected users. In a bug thread, Bienvenu said, “I’ll roll back the launch of this experiment and try to figure out how to deal with Citrix.
“This has had a huge impact for all our call centre agents and is not able to chat with our members,” said Costco IT admin in Chromium Thread. We spent the last day and a half trying to find out. “
One IT administrator said that the issue was on the verge of “we thought it was a shady thing that Google could silently update Chrome without announcing anything and affect 100,000+ people on a whim.” Those concerns are mirrored by Google’s support forum, bug tracker thread, and hundreds of replies on Twitter and Reddit.
This left it annoying administrators that they have wasted valuable resources and time on trying to fix issues in their environment and questioned why Google decided to make a silent change to Chrome in the first place. In response to Bienvenu’s confirmation on the items, an IT administrator said, “I am stunned by your response.” “Do you see the impact you made for thousands of us without any warning or explanation? We are not your test subjects. We are running professional services for multi-million dollar programs.
We’ve reached out to Google for comments on Chrome issues, and we’ll update you accordingly.
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