4 ms·

Chrome experiment crashes thousands of browsers and angers IT admins

26 points by dantondwa 7y ago

marmot777 7y ago
Wow, this is surprising. Why would Google pull a stunt like this?
- Phillips126 7y ago
  Given Google's domination in the browser market, there really needs to be some accountability. Web browsers are an incredibly important tool for most(all?) businesses and if changes are not documented (including stealth patches) this is very concerning.
  - marmot777 7y ago
    For sure. If they don’t have an adult in the room that says “hey this is a bad idea” then maybe the decision making is too decentralized. Yikes. Or would a higher up have had to have signed up on this? Yikes! Generally, de-centralized decision making power is good within parameters/guard rails.
chopin 7y ago
I wish this gave Chrome the corporate "death penalty", i.e. kicking it off of corporate infrastructure. Google being able to silently update the browser might also have GDPR implications as no-one can be sure that the next version (you didn't notice) exfiltrates sensitive data.
jimrandomh 7y ago
Sounds like a pretty ordinary bug, combined with people not knowing what "experiment" means in the context of Chrome. When new functionality is added to Chrome (or Firefox, or most other large software projects with automatic updates), you don't add it for everyone at once; if you did that, and it turned out to be buggy, everyone would be exposed to the buggy version. Instead you roll it out for a few users, and gradually expand the subset of the userbase which has the feature, while watching for both automatic and manual bug reports. If the bug reports don't come in, you enable the feature for everyone. While the feature is turned on for some people but not for everyone, it's called an "experiment".
- xg15 7y ago
  > combined with people not knowing what "experiment" means in the context of Chrome. Yes, because it's not communicated at all to non-technical users that this stuff is happening at all.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  How would you feel if this ethic was applied to your prescription medication?
  - ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
    It's called a human trial, and it's applied to all prescription medications.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      You don't think there's any difference between what Google is doing and the protocol for signing people up to a drug trial? Is it obvious they are equally consensual?
pasttense01 7y ago
For much more extensive discussion see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542716 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1024837 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102483...

26 points by dantondwa 7y ago

marmot777 7y ago

Wow, this is surprising. Why would Google pull a stunt like this?

Phillips126 7y ago
Given Google's domination in the browser market, there really needs to be some accountability. Web browsers are an incredibly important tool for most(all?) businesses and if changes are not documented (including stealth patches) this is very concerning.
- marmot777 7y ago
  For sure. If they don’t have an adult in the room that says “hey this is a bad idea” then maybe the decision making is too decentralized. Yikes. Or would a higher up have had to have signed up on this? Yikes! Generally, de-centralized decision making power is good within parameters/guard rails.

chopin 7y ago

I wish this gave Chrome the corporate "death penalty", i.e. kicking it off of corporate infrastructure. Google being able to silently update the browser might also have GDPR implications as no-one can be sure that the next version (you didn't notice) exfiltrates sensitive data.

jimrandomh 7y ago

Sounds like a pretty ordinary bug, combined with people not knowing what "experiment" means in the context of Chrome. When new functionality is added to Chrome (or Firefox, or most other large software projects with automatic updates), you don't add it for everyone at once; if you did that, and it turned out to be buggy, everyone would be exposed to the buggy version. Instead you roll it out for a few users, and gradually expand the subset of the userbase which has the feature, while watching for both automatic and manual bug reports. If the bug reports don't come in, you enable the feature for everyone. While the feature is turned on for some people but not for everyone, it's called an "experiment".

xg15 7y ago
> combined with people not knowing what "experiment" means in the context of Chrome. Yes, because it's not communicated at all to non-technical users that this stuff is happening at all.
perl4ever 7y ago
How would you feel if this ethic was applied to your prescription medication?
- ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
  It's called a human trial, and it's applied to all prescription medications.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    You don't think there's any difference between what Google is doing and the protocol for signing people up to a drug trial? Is it obvious they are equally consensual?

pasttense01 7y ago

For much more extensive discussion see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542716 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1024837 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102483...