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Chrome browser for businesses

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Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#171

Post by tomelders »

neiled wrote: post #169
tomelders wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive actually been working in banks mainly. But on the business side. At the upper echelons there is a real appetite for change. Banks realise that they have become software companies, but that their businesses are groaning under the weight of antiquated systems and processes and it is holding them back. But even the board can only affect so much. The only reason an auto update would take down an app is if all develop…

Not only does Dev stop, but the people that built the app, agreed on the specs and really understood it, all left too. Auto update is unfortunately something that's just not worth the risk in a lot of cases.

Thats called bad management.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#173

Post by dang »

iampherocity wrote: post #172

My apologies.

Comments like this will get your account banned from HN. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13277020 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#174

Post by tossedaway334 »

tomelders wrote: post #171
neiled wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only does Dev stop, but the people that built the app, agreed on the specs and really understood it, all left too. Auto update is unfortunately something that's just not worth the risk in a lot of cases.

Thats called bad management.

It is the reality of the situation in a vast amount of companies.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#175

Post by wolfgke »

ggregoire wrote: post #161
homero wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely true, now video games on discs are manufactured completely broken or even mostly empty and they make you download 50gb on launch day

Are you talking about Final Fantasy XV? This case is ridiculous, they are even modifying the story after the launch day. It would be like releasing a movie and changing the end one week after the release because of the bad reviews. Hopefuly the sales of FFXV are relatively bad.

> It would be like releasing a movie and changing the end one week after the release because of the bad reviews.

To me this is not that uncommon. Let me tell you a story (I cannot provide a quotable evidence for a central point of the story except for multiple friends who independently had the same feeling after seeing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets two times in few weeks when it came out in cinema in Germany).

At that time when this movie came out in Germany there was a law that "FSK 12" movies must only be watched by people who are at least 12 years old. The problem was: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was rated "FSK 12", while Warner would have liked it to be "FSK 6". So they cut some scene parts out of the movie to get this rating for the German cinema release (BTW: this incident lead to a change in the laws that now children under 12 years old may also go to "FSK 12" movies as long as they are accompanied by a parent). So far this is a story where for every claim I could provide strong evidence.

Now the strange part comes: (#) People who saw this movie shortly after release day and a few weeks after (in Germany) all could point out to some scenes (and they were the same) that they clearly remembered when they first saw the movie, but not the second time. So it seems to be that there were some cut alterings done afterwards and there were actually two different versions to be seen in German cinemas. I personally assume that this had to do something with the stated age restrictions (they forgot to cut some scene parts when they initially released the movie in the cinemas, so they hastily changed things afterwards and released a new version to the cinemas).

As I said: I can provide no independently verifiable evidence that (#) happened - but I deeply trust the independent persons that claimed so and I deeply trust their visual memory (I would only trust people who have a really good visual memory for such strong claims).

TLDR: changing a movie shortly after release is nothing that deeply surprises me.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#176

Post by illumin8 »

DougN7 wrote: post #134
tomelders wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I question if you've worked with large enterprises. They freeze everything for a decade or more. Think about a bank with 500 offices, a dozen tellers at each office. Having their internal web app that everyone uses go down because of an auto upgrade could cost them hundreds of millions. They have a very different risk appetite.

That doesn't mean this is a good practice. In fact, I would argue that this type of thinking has created far more harm than good for both the IT industry as well as the companies that adopt this harmful practice.

Case in point: many of these same companies that refuse to upgrade systems for a decade or more are still running Windows XP and Server 2003. Due to the negligence of their IT leadership, they are now vulnerable to all types of security vulnerabilities that won't be patched, and have put both their business and their customer's private data at risk.

This is no different than a state or local government refusing to maintain critical infrastructure like bridges and tunnels. Negligence might be viewed as conservatism for a few years, but when the bridge collapses because routine maintenance wasn't performed, it becomes clear that the administration who neglected maintenance was at fault.

The sooner the cancerous idea, that IT software can be frozen in some golden state of perpetually providing business value with zero maintenance required, dies, the better.

Modern, thoughtful IT leadership realizes the value in a continuously updated, secure browser. Chrome is already winning the browser war in the Enterprise for this reason alone. This just provides additionally needed controls like white-listed extensions that are known to be safe.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#177

Post by 0xfeba »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #88
alkonaut wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. :)

Heh, the MS Windows file/folder permissions tab comes to mind when you mention that. Been single-threaded for 20+ years now. Clicking on the Add... button always freezes the UI while it communicates with the domain controller or whatever it does.

http://imgur.com/a/YbGbU

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#178

Post by untog »

donatj wrote: post #107
alkonaut wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't have to use antiquated tools and practices just to use desktop apps. I'm not arguing to use the old apps, I'm arguing that a lot of new development should be desktop when it's often made as web apps without thought. We threw all the good stuff with desktop out at the same time as we moved to intranets. You can still have centralized deployment, thin clients etc, but have the niceties of proper native app…

> A clean understandable web UI is good for a seldom used app, but a lot of the intranet apps are "constant use" and were faster to use in their legacy dos implementation than the newer web version. Browser hell just makes the problem worse. This. Click, wait, click, wait, click, wait is in no way better than how quickly you can fly with a well memorized set of keyboard shortcuts in a native app.

This is not a web vs. native problem. You can implement keyboard shortcuts in a webapp. You can neglect to implement keyboard shortcuts in a native app.

This is all about attention to detail, which internal corporate apps almost always lack.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#179

Post by illumin8 »

riprowan wrote: post #166
tomelders wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive actually been working in banks mainly. But on the business side. At the upper echelons there is a real appetite for change. Banks realise that they have become software companies, but that their businesses are groaning under the weight of antiquated systems and processes and it is holding them back. But even the board can only affect so much. The only reason an auto update would take down an app is if all develop…

Dev stops. That's reality. If you hand-wave it away, your tellers go down, and you, the CIO, lose your job. Not all software is under your direct control. Once business processes achieve a stable working state, it is imperative that they maintain uptime, sometimes in excess of six-sigma uptime. Imagine your business is NASA. Are you going to let mission systems auto-update 18 secs before launch?

The dirty truth is that every piece of software or infrastructure you deploy immediately becomes "technical debt," and you know the thing about debt is that it charges interest.

You can choose to neglect paying on your debt for some period of time, but it always comes back, more expensive, later. Case in point: the IT leaders that refused to upgrade from Windows XP and Server 2003 are now paying astronomical prices for "extended support" and "migration/rehosting." If they would have simply invested in maintenance to ensure compatibility with newer OS/browser combinations, they would not have this problem.

Pay now, or pay much much more later. Tech debt is a huge problem in IT, and ignoring it won't make it go away.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#180

Post by FT_intern »

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.

Isn't that true for all browsers (and OSes)?
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