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Chrome Bug IT

Google Chrome Experiment Crashes Browser Tabs, Impacts Companies Worldwide (zdnet.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the watch-out dept.
A Google Chrome experiment has gone horribly wrong this week and ended up crashing browsers on thousands, if not more, enterprise networks for nearly two days. From a report: The issue first appeared on Wednesday, November 13. It didn't impact all Chrome users, but only Chrome browsers running on Windows Server "terminal server" setups -- a very common setup in enterprise networks According to hundreds of reports, users said that Chrome tabs were going blank, all of a sudden, in what's called a "White Screen of Death" (WSOD) error. The issue was no joke. System administrators at many companies reported that hundreds and thousands of employees couldn't use Chrome to access the internet, as the active browser tab kept going blank while working. In tightly controlled enterprise environments, many employees didn't have the option to change browsers and were left unable to do their jobs. Similarly, system administrators couldn't just replace Chrome with another browser right away.
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Google Chrome Experiment Crashes Browser Tabs, Impacts Companies Worldwide More

Google Chrome Experiment Crashes Browser Tabs, Impacts Companies Worldwide

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  • Chrome Browser for enterprise (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 16, 2019 @01:35AM (#59419320)
    Shouldn't they have been using Chrome Browser for enterprise with policies to prevent Chrome experiment from being inflicted on users? https://cloud.google.com/chrom... [google.com]

    • Re:Chrome Browser for enterprise (Score:5, Informative)

      by sodul ( 833177 ) on Saturday November 16, 2019 @03:04AM (#59419418) Homepage

      If you read the bug report thread many were using the enterprise edition. Unfortunately Google reserves the right to push many flags that are not explicitly in the control of the admins such as revoking ssl certs.

      https://bugs.chromium.org/p/ch... [chromium.org]

      > However, some components are exempt from this policy: updates to any component that does not contain executable code, or does not significantly alter the behavior of the browser, or is critical for its security will not be disabled.

      https://getadmx.com/?Category=... [getadmx.com]

      • However, fixing the problem actually made system administrators even angrier. 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.

        Seriously, who the fuck in Google thought this would be a good idea? That's beyond bad.

    • Re:Chrome Browser for enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Carewolf ( 581105 ) on Saturday November 16, 2019 @04:01AM (#59419466) Homepage

      Shouldn't they have been using Chrome Browser for enterprise with policies to prevent Chrome experiment from being inflicted on users?
      https://cloud.google.com/chrom... [google.com]

      You shouldn't be using spyware in enterprise anyway.

    • Funny enough, that page also suggests testing the beta release. If even one company affected had done so, the problem could have been reported to Google and fixed before it got pushed to stable.

      • Re:Chrome Browser for enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mrbester ( 200927 ) on Saturday November 16, 2019 @05:11AM (#59419558) Homepage

        "Hey, we're a multi-billion dollar company, but can't be bothered to test our software properly. If you could just roll out this beta to your internal corporate network and test it for us that would be aces. TIA luv da Goog"

        Yeah. Bollocks to that.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by N1AK ( 864906 )
          Suit yourself but telling your boss that you didn't bother beta testing the software because the vendor you are responsible for selecting "should" be testing it better doesn't sound like a great idea...

          It's not uncommon, and we have three waves, for companies to deploy updates in a rolling waves exactly so that we have a chance to pick up issues before they are widely deployed. This wouldn't have protected us in this case because we don't currently test browsers before full release, but you can bet we'll

      • What if I told you that Google are an enterprise, and that they could have tested the beta themselves.
        #mindblown

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sodul ( 833177 )

        This bug was present in all releases of Chrome for several months but was enabled to 1% of the systems, without notifications to the system admins, who just assumed they had some randomly glitching machines, then pushed to all Chrome installation, again silently and regardless of policies that sysadmins had control over. So this happened with no changes on the customers side, and rolling back to previous releases or doing full reinstalls did not undo the behavior. This is why so many people are so pissed. T

      • You test the vendors new software to make sure that your stuff works with it. You don't test their software to test for bugs in their code. It's doubtful that anyone doing testing of their company's software would have overlapped another window on top of the browser winder during testing on a beta version and triggered this response. And even then it was with specific versions of Windows which the testers might not be working with. I'm just saying that even if companies did test the beta that had the featur

  • Hey Hey the jobs not done 'till chrome browser won't run!????? You can't see why it is screwing up in the server client connection code of active directory desktops. But don't despair you can now just change over to a much more reliable browser in Windows called Edge and it will save your settings on Microsoft cloud with the same browser engine. Best part is you can now forget using dangerous insecure Google cloud features for good.

  • If it operates like most of their experiments, they have assigned a random chance to who gets to try to the new feature, and it is reevaluated on each launch to avoid stuck crashing states. Yeah, Google Chrome is not deterministic.

  • Because they wanted stability and not the latest shiny toys. Firefox offered an ESR version after pressure from their rapid release schedule kept breaking things. I think it’s time Chrome offered an ESR version too that doesn’t offer random experiments. I still think Microsoft with the new IE mode in the new Edge will take over as the new enterprise browser after this Chrome incident.

    • Firefox offered an ESR version

      They still do. You get security and bug fixes for (I think) a year, then a new base-ESR version comes out and you move to that. The "normal" users are effectively acting as beta-testers.

    • I think it's time Chrome offered an ESR version too that doesn't offer random experiments.

      Yeah, I know, because it's too much to expect half-competent sysadmins to replace the standard Chrome shortcut with one that runs chrome.exe --no-experiments. Sheesh.

      • It's far too much to expect that experiments would be opt-in rather than defaults in an enterprise edition.
        Two can play this game.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        I would expect a half competent sysadmin to read the documentation.

        https://support.google.com/chr... [google.com] doesn't mention Google experimenting.

        The referenced policy list at http://www.chromium.org/admini... [chromium.org] doesn't either.

        So yes, it is too much to expect half-competent syadmins to set a flag that no fucker knew existed and wouldn't even have gone looking for because what sort of cunt releases a browser with automatic 'fuck you senseless' opt-ins?

        People wonder why Chrome isn't my default browser...

    • Yeah, I suspect that Microsoft's PR team is salivating over this incident and will be directly or at least indirectly cited when selling Edge-Chromium to enterprise users next year.

      "So you get all of the compatibility of Chrome, but we have absolutely zero spyware, your support contracts entitle you to immediate support and all updates will be run through Windows Update. Don't worry we have IE mode built-in so you can even use it for your old web apps."

      The first thing that needs to be fixed though is all of

  • And those always end well (not)

    Google messed up big time here.
    Chrome is a resource hog at the best of times. Time to send it to the trashcan (where it should have been put a long time ago)

  • It always annoyed me that chrome will continue to render a GIF or otherwise drain my battery when the entire window is occluded. That behavior should have never existed.

    So the silver lining on this shit-cloud is that, once they iron out the bugs, that will be hopefully be better.

  • I think that it shouldn't be a browser's business to check whether other application's windows are overlapping its view. What the OS does to other applications is very specific and can cover cases that the developers of Chrome could not foresee. Perhaps in this case the"browser as an OS" concept has gone too far.

  • "A Google Chrome experiment has gone horribly wrong "

    You never learn as much as rapidly as when an experiment goes horribly wrong.
    Then at least the right people are looking at the problem.

  • Windows comes with a cli ftp client. That's how I've fixed hundreds of totally borked Windows PCs using only remote access.
  • Hmm, is it just a coincidink that several web sites have been giving me blank pages over the last three days? On my iPad?

  • If your system relies on an evergreen browser for which you have no control over releases, then your system admins are not worth the money you pay them.

  • " We want all of your data in the cloud and to lock you up tight because we are Trustworthy(TM). We wouldn't dare think of playing Chernobyl when you least expect it. Honest (old offensive word for Native American)!"

  • Sounds pretty stupid doesn't it but that is what corporate America seems to like to do. And then blame someone else.

    LoB

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