Google’s silent Chrome experiment crashes thousands of browsers and angers IT admins

oldschool

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Mar 29, 2018
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Blank white screens in Chrome left many IT admins and users confused
By Tom Warren@tomwarren Nov 15, 2019, 5:13am EST

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 like Citrix kept seeing white screens on open Chrome tabs, blocking access to the browser and leaving it totally unresponsive. It left many IT admins confused over the problem, as businesses typically manage and control Chrome updates.
After complaints, Google was forced to reveal it had launched an “experiment” on stable versions of Chrome that had changed the browser’s behavior. The experiment was made silently, without IT admins or users being warned about Google’s changes. Google had simply flipped the switch on a flag to enable a new WebContents Occlusion feature that’s designed to suspend Chrome tabs when you move other apps on top of them and reduce resource usage when the browser isn’t in use.
“The experiment / flag has been on in beta for ~5 months,” explained David Bienvenu, a software engineer at Google, in a Chromium bug thread. “It was turned on for stable (e.g., m77, m78) via an experiment that was pushed to released Chrome Tuesday morning. Prior to that, it had been on for about one percent of M77 and M78 users for a month with no reports of issues, unfortunately.”


Continue reading here Google’s silent Chrome experiment crashes thousands of browsers and angers IT admins
 

RejZoR

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Nov 26, 2016
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Oh boy, please find my posts from years ago when I said absurdly paced releases with major version numbers that are hidden from users view and updating process hidden from user view will bring so many problems. And behold, problems are here. And behold how nothing will change, people will bitch and still use stupid Chrome. Yay.
 
L

Local Host

Oh boy, please find my posts from years ago when I said absurdly paced releases with major version numbers that are hidden from users view and updating process hidden from user view will bring so many problems. And behold, problems are here. And behold how nothing will change, people will bitch and still use stupid Chrome. Yay.
There's a reason Google doesn't provide a read-able changelog for each browser update.
 
F

ForgottenSeer 823865

@RejZoR I'm just a bit surprised that there hasn't been more reaction to this from forum members. I guess we are in the minority.
Because Chrome is property of Google and they do what they want, it is their right.
If some people don't like it, they can still move to other browsers then be happy.
For now, Chrome is the most secure browser and i still use it because it sync perfectly with my Android Phones.
Other browsers are way behind or are just pale copies...
 

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