A silent trial change by Google on Chrome this week has left thousands of devices in companies with unresponsive disabled browsers.
Business users who access Chrome through virtual machine environments such as Citrix have continued to see white screens in open Chrome tabs, blocking access to the browser and making it unresponsive.
These problems have made many IT executives angry, with companies typically running and controlling Chrome updates, but a sudden change in browser behavior has left them confused, dumping Google support forums.
After making complaints, the search giant was forced to reveal that it launched an experiment on stable versions of Chrome that changed the behavior of the browser, and it seems that they forgot to take into account the use of virtual machine environments while deploying the experiment.
The experiment was conducted silently, without warning IT administrators or users of Google's changes.
The experiment was about enabling a new feature for WebContents content designed to pause Chrome tabs and reduce resource usage when the browser is not in use.
David Bienvenu, a software engineer at Google, explained that the experiment had been running for about 5 months, running on stable versions, and before that it was working on about one percent of Chrome 77 and Chrome 78 users for a month with no reports of Problems.
Google retracted the change, following multiple reports from companies with thousands of affected users, David said: We will retreat from the launch of this experience and try to learn how to deal with Citrix.
Costco's IT supervisor explained that the experience had a huge impact on all of their call center agents with the inability to chat with members.
"We felt there was a mystery where Google could update Chrome silently without announcing anything and its decision could affect more than 100,000 people," an IT official said.
These concerns reflect hundreds of responses in the Google Support Forum, Twitter and Reddit, as well as questions about why Google decided to make a silent change to Chrome in the first place.
In response to David Benveno, an IT official said:Do you see the impact you have created for our thousands without any warning or explanation, and do you understand how many hours of resources your experiment has wasted? “We are not test subjects for your company, but we run professional services for millions of dollars.