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Chrome browser for businesses

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Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#181

Post by johnward »

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.

With web apps there should be very little risk if you followed standards. The problem is most of these places chose to follow IE6 instead of standards. They will put this off until it becomes a major issue or someone else takes their business. By know I've left banks of terrible client facing systems but internal enn efficiencies are even obvious. It took almost 8 weeks, multiple in person visits, and a freaking typewriter to get my HELOC. It might take another bank a visit and home appraisal and you get a check.

The "risk adverse" nature, I can't belive I just said that about a bank, will become a problem.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#182

Post by CaptSpify »

cmdrfred wrote: post #113
majewsky wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works reasonably well for applications that are used daily or weekly (deprecation notifications help). But then, after you phased out IE8 after months of no problems with IE10, during the holiday period the accountant tries to close the yearly accounts, finds that the form does not work with IE10, and hell breaks loose.

Can't you just build on HTML and JavaScript api's that are widely utilized and accepted? I know before I call something I'm unfamiliar with I'll look up what browsers support it. Most of the problems with IE versions have to do with plugins be it ActiveX or a Java applet. In my mind that isn't a web app but an application packed in a web browser (often so the consultants can call it a web app, "you go to a website to…

> Can't you just build on HTML and JavaScript api's that are widely utilized and accepted?

Absolutely. I still have websites that I designed with ie6 in mind that work just fine. But if modern design trends are any indication, it just won't happen. Designers want too many of the new flashy features.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#183

Post by johnward »

radicalbyte wrote: post #132
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…

The problem is that Chrome remove features without providing any viable replacement. For example Flash: currently the Chrome audio APIs do not cover all of the functionality provided by Flash. You cannot, for example, pause the recording of audio. If you have a product which requires that functionality then you're stuck. You can't upgrade. In the recent past I was in just that position: we had no choice but to block…

I've had discussions internally and the it staff basically said they will not considered actual support for Chrome. However they let us install any browser and support reps just instruct people to use certain browsers for antiquated software.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#184

Post by CaptSpify »

FT_intern wrote: post #180
saw-lau wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Not for Linux and Firefox afaik.

At the very least, they are modifiable to not do that.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#186

Post by dmm »

imaginenore wrote: post #158
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.

What the hell are you talking about? Chrome's support for standards is stellar. It's actually better than FF's. https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/ http://caniuse.com/#feat=async-functions http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+11,edge+14,firefox+50,chrome+...

It's not really about standard compliance, it's more an issue of how the browser behaves in non-standard situations and other fun edge cases. If devs only test with chrome then it's very easy to become dependent on behavior specific to chrome.

For example, yesterday I was implementing a server that uses http multipart to stream images to a browser. multipart uses two methods to frame messages: a length prefix and a boundary token. So when you send a message you prefix it with something like

    Content-Type: image/jpeg
    Content-Length: 12345
And you end it with something like

    --MagicArbitraryBoundaryTokenPreviouslySpecifiedInHead
In principle these are redundant, you could frame the content with either one but both are provided. And that's where the problem started. I misspelled a property name and because I'm using javascript it helpfully inserted 'undefined' in the "Content-Length" header. Firefox refused to display the images but chrome happily displayed them as if there were no problem.

If I had only tested in chrome I probably wouldn't have noticed that my code had a problem that was breaking other browsers.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#187

Post by DougWebb »

tomelders wrote: post #170
riprowan wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think we can all agree that NASA is a special case. Also, is it 100% true that they dont update software on actuve systems mid mission? What if they discover a critical bug?

Of course NASA updates software mid-mission; they're famous for sending software updates out to deep-space probes and rovers to fix things as critical as communication issues, which is quite a neat trick.

What they don't do is allow updates to happen automatically. They're carefully pre-tested, and the update is carefully planned and scheduled. Their goal, like most enterprises, is to minimize risk, and bugs that you know about and understand the impact of are much less risky than updated software you haven't been able to test yet.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#188

Post by crispyambulance »

tomelders wrote: post #122
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…

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 wish I could paste a screenshot of my desktop with Oracle EBS (enterprise business suite) windows open-- it looks like something straight out of 1997. Horrifically bad interfaces that burn through users' time and patience with no end in sight and surly non-responsive staff running it. Efficiency be damned, and yes, people are perfectly happy to throw money down the drain to keep it running.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#189

Post by rsync »

m-p-3 wrote: post #15

This isn't a new thing at all, but more awareness to the sysadmins shouldn't hurt. Also, let me point you to the Legacy Browser Support extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/legacy-browser-sup... With proper GPOs you can force a domain/subdomain to open in IE directly from any links.

What I really want is the ability (recipe ?) to chroot a browser.

I would like to run 3-4 browsers at all times, each with totally sandboxed identity and IP address.

However I do not necessarily want to run a full blown VM for each of them.

This is very simple and efficient for sandboxing server daemons - I do it all the time and there is almost zero overhead involved in chroot/jail. However I have never chrooted a GUI application and cannot find any instances/recipes of anyone chrooting a browser ...

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#190

Post by EvanAnderson »

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…

It's not just "internal" plumbing. We've had to stop Chrome updates in our Customer sites, from time to time, because "cloud hosted" applications were rendered unusable by updated Chrome versions. Eventually the third-parties got their acts together, but we would have had user-facing outages if we hadn't been cautious with allowing Chrome updates to deploy. I'm glad that the ability to "freeze" the Chrome version exists.
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