Automatic updates to close security holes are usually a good thing, especially for millions of consumer machines. But for business, having thousands of PCs receive software updates without forewarning or control fills IT admins with dread. Google just proved why that dread is well-placed.
As The Verge reports, earlier this week Google decided to silently roll out an experimental change to the Chrome browser. Usually, this isn't an issue for business users as Google allows IT admins to use their own on-premise tools and set Chrome policies for corporate-managed computers. However, this change was applied to those computers anyway, and Google apparently decided not to tell anyone it was happening.
The change enabled a new WebContents Occlusion feature, which reduces the resources used by hidden tabs. The problem is, the feature suspends Chrome tabs and it looks as though Google didn't account for multiple users logging into the same server to access Chrome. So when one user locked their screen, everyone else on the server had their screens go blank. Now imagine that at an organization with thousands or hundreds of thousands of users and you can see the scale of the problem Google created.
As IT admins were unaware a change had rolled out to the browser they started filing bug reports on the Chromium bug thread. Eventually Google had to admit it silently updated the browser for business users. Google software engineer David Bienvenu explained in the bug thread that, "The experiment / flag has been on in beta for ~5 months ... 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."
The change has since been rolled back by Google, but the situation has done nothing to help improve Google's reputation with business users. Not only did it anger IT admins by removing control and a lack of information sharing, it also left businesses unable to correspond with their customers/members.
The situation is best summed up by this comment on the bug thread, "Do you see the impact you created for thousands of us without any warning or explanation? We are not your test subjects. We are running professional services for multi million dollar programs. Do you understand how many hours of resources were wasted by your "experiment"? Not acceptable."
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