It’s been just reported that Google left thousands of computers with broken Chrome browsers during this week. If you’re wondering what could have gone this wrong, well, it seems that business users who accessed Chrome via virtual machine environments such as Citrix kept seeing white scenes on open Chrome tabs, says the latest report coming from The Verge.
It’s been also revealed that all this resulted in blocking access to the browser and leaving it completely unresponsive.
It also left a lot of IT admins confused over the issue. Usually, businesses typically manage and control Chrome updates.
What actually happened?
After the complaints, Google has been forced to reveal what had actually happened.
It seems that the tech giant has launched an experiment on the stable versions of Chrome that ended up changing the browser’s behavior. This experiment was made without too much fuss and what’s even worse, without IT admins or users being warned about Google’s changes.
Enabling a new WebContent Occlusion feature
It’s been also revealed that Google enabled a new WebContent Occlusion feature that was designed to suspend Chrome tabs when you’re moving other apps on top of them and reduce resource usage when the browser is not in use.
“The experiment/flag has been on in beta for ~5 months,” stated David Bienvenu, a software engineer at Google, in a Chromium bug thread.
He was coted by The Verge as saying that “It was turned on for stable (e.g., m77, m78) via an experiment that was pushed to released Chrome Tuesday morning. Prior to that, it had been on for about one percent of M77 and M78 users for a month with no reports of issues, unfortunately.”
In other news, Google made headlines again in relation to the latest Google Play Services update that started rolling out via OTA channels.
