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

191–200 of 282 posts

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#191

Post by DougWebb »

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 seems like many movies these days get released with two versions when the theater run is complete; one version that matches what was shown in theaters, and one Director's Cut. The latter often includes scenes that were cut to get a specific rating, but it also often changes things that caused bad reviews. Superman v Batman is a good example; the theatrical release got bad reviews for being confusing, and the Directors Cut includes a lot of backstory scenes which help the movie make more sense. (Can't help the overall plot holes though.)

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#192

Post by CaptSpify »

sathackr wrote: post #141
therealmarv wrote: post #83

Oh cool, a version for corporate rule fetishism admins who love controlling their MSI files. Happy I don't work in such an environment.

when the MSI file defaults to sending crash dumps that may contain confidential financial information, to a server located in the developers broom closet, yes, we have to control the MSI files. Because admins have to answer to the auditors(and our conscience) when they ask the question "How do you ensure that personal and confidential information is not leaked from your environment" Which is why Windows 10 is my wors…

That is a legit concern, but if that is the case, Chrome, Win10 and the like should be completely off the table.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#193

Post by DougWebb »

bmj wrote: post #143
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…

It's not just engineering/R&D that makes this decision. IT departments generally have the last word on what applications (browsers, for example) will be supported. A real life example: I worked on a team that maintained a data portal website used by major pharma companies and clinical research organizations. It had to be IE7-proof for a very long time because many of our largest clients were still running very old br…

I had a similar experience. I was developing a customer portal website for one of my company's clients. Well into the project I found out that everyone at the company, including everyone who would be doing QA, had monitors that only went up to 800x600, they were all locked down to an old version of IE (8 or 9 I think), and they had a default-blocked web proxy in place so they needed special permission to even see the test portal I had running on my server.

Happily we did convince them to get some hardware and software upgrades, so by the end of the project they were able to see their website the way most of their customers would. The proxy continues to be a nuisance; their developer can't access the cloud server where their production website is deployed; he has to rely on me to make any changes that are needed there.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#194

Post by sangnoir »

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…

> 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

Counter-argument: software does exist in a 'done' state, or rather snapshots of it via releases. When version 1.2.1 is done, it is done.

Version numbers are a sane way to manage things for sys-admins and software engineers (think compatibility matrices and SemVer). I'm going to guess you are closer to the engineer side of that spectrum: can you imagine the insanity of having to maintain compatibility with a library that is self-updating and has an 'evergreen' API? The ability to pin versions is a God-send, falling too many versions behind is abusing that ability.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#196

Post by CaptSpify »

tossedaway334 wrote: post #174
tomelders wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats called bad management.

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

Only because we let them. I'm very much against auto-updating software, but I still don't see this as a good argument against them. It's not that companies can't keep up, it's that companies choose not to keep up. In this aspect, taking away their choice is the winning move, imo

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#197

Post by fbreduc »

NoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!

i already knew this was the case since they installed an "enterprise antivirus plugin recently on my chrome and now the thing makes my computer unbearable. Time to switch to another browser at work :(

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#198

Post by DougWebb »

untog wrote: post #178
donatj wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can add keyboard shortcuts to a webapp. What you can't do is control or override the keyboard shortcuts that the browser adds, and you can't make use of the full suite of possible keyboard shortcuts. I've looked at adding shortcuts to my webapps many times over the years, and it's never been worth the effort because the result is just confusing to the user.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#199

Post by SeanBoocock »

homero wrote: post #148
eddieroger wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That has never been true. Sure it has. When software existed on physical media and there was a real, material cost with distribution of software, there was absolutely a done state. Waterfall software development and actual requirement control would clearly define done states. That's not to say that there weren't bug fixes and updates, but it was (and is) possible to define what an application should do, code it to…

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

That is not true. Games released physically for video game consoles must pass platform certification requirements and only then manufacture, distribute, and release the game. The lead time required for this in my experience is on the order of 2-3 months, during which time the development team cannot touch the "gold master" build of the game.

The build that ends up on the disk is not "completely broken or even mostly empty"; it is what the development team and publisher were satisfied shipping as the finished game 2-3 months prior. Any software, and games moreso, can be improved with more time so the intervening time to release day is often taken up with development of a launch day patch to fix bugs that were triaged to be ok to ship with, and/or to add features/systems/content that just missed the cut before.

Launch day patch sizes is more of a symptom of the build pipeline (maybe there is some non-determinism that is introducing larger diffs than are otherwise necessary) or late optimizations (to build packing, asset management, etc) that can force you to download the majority of the game again.

Re: Chrome browser for businesses

#200

Post by qyv »

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?

I think the point here is that there is no such thing as a stable state in software. Maintaining old infrastructure to support old applications is not a steady-state, it is a degrading state. As bugs and exploits are discovered and patched in new versions of windows/browsers/databases/frameworks/libraries/etc the old systems degrade to a vulnerable, un-maintainable, unsupported and often un-upgradeable state.
Post reply on HN