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

Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 109 posts

Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide

#11

Post by kaared »

voiper1 wrote: post #2

>Many didn't know that Chrome engineers could run experiments on their tightly-controlled Chrome installations, let alone that Google engineers could just ship changes to everyone's browsers without any prior approval. Uhm, isn't that the entire auto-update feature, that google ships changes without you even being aware?

My interpretation of the below quote from the article is that Google enabled the feature through pushing a configuration change to active clients. So if I'm a sysadmin and have done my due diligence and successfully tested the new build (with my configuration) before deploying it, I would be very unhappy if/when Google decides to turn this on without my consent or knowledge.

Ref. quote from article:

"Chrome engineers operate a system called Finch that lets them push updated Chrome settings to active installs, such as enabling or disabling experimental flags."

Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide

#13

Post by mrspuratic »

esquire_900 wrote: post #8
tomc1985 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't a lot of alternatives to the current trend of shipping shit fast and furious.

Firefox does: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-esr-release-cyc...

ESR user for many years, plus useragent-switcher for sites that pretend to care about my "security" (but mostly care about CSS eye candy and the latest whizzbang). Free beta tester for other people isn't in my job description ;-)

Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide

#14

Post by dragonwriter »

tomc1985 wrote: post #5
esquire_900 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange indeed that "tightly controlled enterprise environments" are so blissfully unaware of the functionality of chrome.

There aren't a lot of alternatives to the current trend of shipping shit fast and furious.

> There aren't a lot of alternatives to the current trend of shipping shit fast and furious.

Sure there are, especially in enterprise, where IE is still a thing.

There aren't good alternatives, but...

Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide

#15

Post by ocdtrekkie »

BuckRogers wrote: post #7

I’ve seen Chrome in so many corporate environments and never understood why. Native browsers work fine and are crafted to work reliably in the environment they’re used in. My guess is some admins simply like Chrome and thus decided everyone should. I like Firefox but I keep it at home, at work I use Microsoft Edge.

An unfortunate number of services now ask people to use them only via Chrome. In my environment, I tell them to get over themselves, and we use Firefox. But a lot of services specifically state an expectation of using Chrome. It really is the new IE6.

Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide

#16

Post by Freak_NL »

esquire_900 wrote: post #8
tomc1985 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't a lot of alternatives to the current trend of shipping shit fast and furious.

Firefox does: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-esr-release-cyc...

I always recommend Firefox ESR to corporate clients that use our web-based product. Long-term stability, automatic security updates, and a yearly, well-documented release cycle that allows their IT department to test the upcoming ESR release and upgrade with confidence, while we get the benefit of a modern web browser to target.

Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide

#17

Post by transreal »

This is the trouble with Google's aggressive auto-update policy. "Everyone is always on the latest" is mandated because everyone should have the latest security updates, but it works great except when it doesn't.

Another example is a recent issue where a Chrome update broke WebView based Android apps and stopped them from being able to make certain types of network requests. It was fixed in 2 weeks, but that 2 week period was full of unhappy customers and lost revenue.

I'm hoping the upcoming Chromium based Edge from Microsoft will allow IT Admins to control when a browser update is rolled out and give them more control over the update process.

Chrome auto-updates can be disabled for networks behind a firewall by blocking the update server address, but that's a very crude way, and doesn't allow for updating a test machine to see how the new version works, or updating to the latest minus 1 version.

Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide

#19

Post by isostatic »

transreal wrote: post #17

This is the trouble with Google's aggressive auto-update policy. "Everyone is always on the latest" is mandated because everyone should have the latest security updates, but it works great except when it doesn't. Another example is a recent issue where a Chrome update broke WebView based Android apps and stopped them from being able to make certain types of network requests. It was fixed in 2 weeks, but that 2 week p…

You could whitelist the test machine
Post reply on HN