Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome browser for businesses

enterprise.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 282 posts

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#121

Post by fbender »

wcummings wrote: post #97
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I miss proper custom desktop apps with horrible looking cluttered interfaces. Soo productive compared to any web based interface for almost all tasks. You mean where everything runs on the UI thread? Gotta pass on that. :)

But (most) browser apps are single threaded and you can block the UI if you do anything intensive on the client-side.

There quite a few ways around that with async APIs and WebWorkers, even ServiceWorkers now. A lot of devs just don't use them properly.

Edit: Did you mean the browser itself could freeze? That's a thing of the past with Firefox being the last browser to separate the content and chrome process. So the web page may freeze, the browser window itself shouldn't.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#122

Post by tomelders »

dingaling wrote: post #73
jpochtar wrote: post #61

Is anyone else concerned that this means IT can choose to hold back the version of Chrome in their organizations? Auto-updating Chrome has been low key one of the best solutions to the pain of backwards compatibility with older browsers. In the past we not only had to worry about compatibility between browsers, we had to worry about compatibility between browser versions. Further, auto-updating Chrome as dramatically…

Companies have far too much internal plumbing to permit browsers to auto-update themselves. Being feature-compatible with the latest SV-poster-child website is insignificant compared to maintaining stability for the tax-management team's internal web app. I was once involved in an IE6 -> IE8 upgrade for a Fortune 100 corporation. It took nine months to analyze all the possible impacts and implement mitigations before…

I think this is a weak argument. The problem here is that companies think that software can exist in some sort of "done" state, where no further updates or development is required.

That has never been true.

The hardware and software changes. The infrastructure it connects to changes. But most importantly, your workflows must evolve if you are to remain efficient.

If you roll your own software, you either commit to constantly updating it, or you commit to throwing a ton of money down the drain when its rots away to the point where it is no longer fit for your workflow or for the world it operates in.

Software is never finished, only abandoned.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#123

Post by hiram112 »

alkonaut wrote: post #84
dingaling wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies have far too much internal plumbing to permit browsers to auto-update themselves. Being feature-compatible with the latest SV-poster-child website is insignificant compared to maintaining stability for the tax-management team's internal web app. I was once involved in an IE6 -> IE8 upgrade for a Fortune 100 corporation. It took nine months to analyze all the possible impacts and implement mitigations before…

It's amusing how we see web apps as the solution to deployment woes. I miss proper custom desktop apps with horrible looking cluttered interfaces. Soo productive compared to any web based interface for almost all tasks.

I think it became harder to write true desktop apps once VB6 was killed off in favor of .Net with its higher learning curve.

As bad as a real language VB6 and it's GUI builder were, it did allow even amateurs to write a decent working crud app in minimal time.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#124

Post by cmdrfred »

Nexxxeh wrote: post #106
TwoBit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox on Android and often run into web sites that don't work right because they are dependent on some Chrome or Webkit behaviour, and I need to switch the browser to desktop mode to resolve the problem.

It's rare for me to find one, although the highest profile annoyance for me is textboxes break on m.facebook.com. The caret refuses to move from the current line without deleting or adding a character. Known issue and I'm yet to see a fix (other than "mbasic" which you have to use for messenger anyway). Almost everything else seems to be fixed with uBlock Origin and/or Reading Mode.

I experianced this myself and was pretty sure this is on purpose. If you request desktop on Chrome for Android you get a stretched out version of the mobile site and the auto complete of your keyboard makes the textbox on messages impossible to use. I think they want to funnel people to the app I just don't go on the site anymore.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#125

Post by swiley »

Quenz wrote: post #95
krzyk wrote: post #18

Is this about replacing one monopoly with another? It is slowly starting too look like in the early 00's, most developers are starting to support only chrome, with no testing in Firefox or latest IE. On Android it is even worse, no one is testing with Firefox Mobile (Fennec) - this is WinXP-IE6 all over again.

One day every webpage will render the same in every browser. One day...

Stick to and and you can probably have that now.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#127

Post by pdimitar »

Quenz wrote: post #93
reitanqild wrote: post #30

For me Chrome is already the new IE: good enough to saturate the market to the point where devs stops caring about standards compliance. Personally I have tried to like it, multiple times but I always get annoyed and go back to FF. But then again I prefer Linux over Mac and Netbeans over IntelliJ so maybe it's just me.

I used to switch between Chrome and Firefox all the time before finally Chrome won me over with the most convenient cloud sync for bookmarks, passwords, etc.

Same for me. Boggles my mind there still isn't a p2p (IPFS-like) system that allows you to take control of your bookmarks and use them with any browser. Then again, Chrome doesn't allow you to specify your own bookmarks server... :(

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#128

Post by dripton »

saw-lau wrote: post #86
jpochtar wrote: post #61

Is anyone else concerned that this means IT can choose to hold back the version of Chrome in their organizations? Auto-updating Chrome has been low key one of the best solutions to the pain of backwards compatibility with older browsers. In the past we not only had to worry about compatibility between browsers, we had to worry about compatibility between browser versions. Further, auto-updating Chrome as dramatically…

I'd just be happy to be able to use it at all at work. Our organisation blocks it because, apparently, 'it sends a lot of data back to Google.' I have no idea if this is true or not.

It's true, but you can turn that stuff off.

You want to turn off things under Privacy like "Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors", "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar", "Automatically report details of possible security incidents to Google", "Use a web service to help resolve spelling errors", and "Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google." And not login into Chrome.

The problem is that even if you tell all your employees what to disable, some of them will probably not comply. So a truly paranoid IT team might want to make their own fork of Chromium with those features removed.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#129

Post by fbender »

bernardlunn wrote: post #96
dingaling wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies have far too much internal plumbing to permit browsers to auto-update themselves. Being feature-compatible with the latest SV-poster-child website is insignificant compared to maintaining stability for the tax-management team's internal web app. I was once involved in an IE6 -> IE8 upgrade for a Fortune 100 corporation. It took nine months to analyze all the possible impacts and implement mitigations before…

Holy moly, that is so toxic and innefficient! Big companies have a big problem.

Yeah the problem is they hired big software companies to develop sub-par software (in terms of being future proof, platform agnostic, and standards-compliant – if there were any standards to begin with) that worked for their needs at that point in time. Now they have to deal with the legacy.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#130

Post by Freak_NL »

Nux wrote: post #118
Freak_NL wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR)¹ for this though. Every year (currently in March) the current normal Firefox version (that does auto-update) is forked for a new ESR support cycle and made available for acceptance. Three months later if all is stable, it replaces the previous ESR release series, and for a year corporate IT gets a browser that will only be updated with critical (security) updates; no ne…

Looking at all these "enterprise" horror stories, I don't think ESR's 1 year is nearly enough. 3 or 5 years might be more suitable.

Most of those horror stories won't happen if you go through the upgrade cycle once a year. A year's worth of chances is manageable for whoever is maintaining the software, three or five years worth of browser features will make the heart of any developer sink.

It is a fallacy to believe that you can stave off updating a modern internet connected browser indefinitely; the IE6/7/8 hell has driven that lesson home in the industry, and security updates are a necessity. If you do need to stay with one particular browser version, then you use a virtual machine or some other properly sandboxed environment to offer it. You can keep running IE6 on Windows XP for as long as you like with a VM that thinks its the year 2003 and which for some reason can only reach http://oldunmaintainedapp.legacy.intranet.example.com. That's fine too (although I would hate to maintain that solution).

Post reply on HN