Google updates Chrome secretly. Damage and inconvenience to thousands of companies

"Not bad," the common user will think. This way you don't even have to worry about launching updates or changing settings. But they don't think the same way several business system administrators, who found themselves with a completely unusable Chrome browser. The problem is not marginal, because many companies, especially those that have completely embraced Google products like GSuite, completely base their operations on the Chrome browser.

Firm call centers, who will repay companies?

A specific example is the one that happened to the Costco American hypermarket chain, which among other things has an online sales site. A company systems administrator commented on the event: "This has had an incredible impact on our call center employees, they were no longer able to chat with our members. It took us a day and a half to understand it". Then, the same administrator warned The Verge by adding"the fact that Google updates Chrome silently without saying anything is a non-transparent behavior and can impact more than 100,000 people on a whim".

These concerns then rebounded on hundreds of requests on the support forums of Google, which eventually had to admit the existence of the so-called "experiment" on stable versions of Chrome. The experiment actually took place without notifying anyone, not even the system administrators of the major company installations. The function to send companies into a panic is called "WebContents Occlusion"and serves to suspend a Chrome tab when a user drags or opens a window above the Chrome window. In practice, when the user uses another application, Chrome temporarily suspends the active tab to save resources and energy. A commendable function, but the user should decide if and when to activate it.

"The experiment was in beta for about 5 months" has explained David Bienvenu, Google software engineer, "has been activated for the stable versions of Chrome (m77 and m78) on an experimental basis. Unfortunately, before that it was active for about 1% of Chrome m77 and m78 users for about a month without anyone reporting any problems".

instead the problem, apparently related to Citrix virtual machines, there was and how. It is difficult to establish what impact a day and a half of offline call center could have had on the Costco chain, which among other things is only one of the companies hit by the problem. But certainly, to set up an experiment without notifying the system administrators of the companies was not a particularly prudent attitude. Who will pay the consequences now?