Silently testing the feature on Chrome, Google caused thousands of browsers to crash, IT staff miserable

Google has left the Chrome browser on thousands of corporate computers inoperable over the past week, probably due to an experimental change they silently made. Specifically, users who access Chrome through virtual machine environments such as Citrix constantly see white screens appearing when opening Chrome tabs, resulting in nothing they can do, and the browser itself Absolutely no reaction at all. Needless to say, many IT system administrators are confused and frustrated, because their daily job is managing and controlling Chrome updates.

After being complained too much, Google was forced to reveal that it had just implemented a “test” on stable versions of Chrome, which changed the behavior of the browser. This test was conducted silently, and neither IT administrators nor users were informed about changes in advance. Google simply activates a parameter to enable a new feature called WebContents Occlusion, which is designed to suspend Chrome tabs when you switch to another application and reduce usage resources when the browser is not touched. .

” This parameter has been in beta for 5 months. It has been enabled in the stable (m77, m78) through a test deployed on Chrome released Tuesday morning. Before that, it was turn on for about 1% of M77 and M78 users in a month, no one has reported any problems “- David Bienvenu, a software engineer at Google, said.

Google had to withdraw the change on Thursday night, after receiving reports from businesses with thousands of affected users. ” I will revoke the test and learn how to deal with Citrix,” Bienvenu said.

An IT administrator of Costco said: ” It has a huge impact on all our call center operators, and it is impossible to chat with company members. one and a half days to try and find a solution “.

An IT administrator said that ” we feel shady that Google can silently update Chrome without notifying anything, and may affect more than 100,000 people at a time.” These concerns are evident in hundreds of responses on Google support forums, bug tracking pages, on Twitter and Reddit.

The bug also angers IT administrators, who spend a lot of valuable resources and time trying to fix bugs in their environment, and these people ask Google to explain at Why decided to make such a silent change in Chrome in the first place. ” I was surprised by their reaction” – an administrator replied to Bienvenu’s error confirmation. ” Do you see the impact you have on thousands of people like us without warning or explanation? We are not test subjects. We provide professional services for programs.” worth millions of dollars “.

Reference: TheVerge