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posted by chromas on Saturday November 16 2019, @02:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the papa-google-knows-best dept.

Google Fixes White Screen Problem in Chrome, Admins Furious

For approximately 5 months, Google has been experimenting with a feature called WebContent Occlusion that hides the content of not-visible tabs so that they use less resources and cause less battery drain.

A Chrome developer stated that this feature caused no problems in their period of testing and on Tuesday morning Google quietly enabled it for users in Chrome 78 Stable release.

[...] While this feature was being tested on Chrome Beta users for some time, it was not properly tested in enterprise terminal server environments.

This became evident in Citrix or Terminal Server environments when a user locked their screen, every other user on that server would have their Chrome tabs suddenly become a white screen.

This happened because web occlusion was enabled in the browser for the locked screen and hid their browser content. At the same time, it also caused the content in tabs for every other user on the same terminal server to become hidden as well.

The only way to fix this was to unlock the screen, but this issue was constantly repeated as other users on the Terminal Server would once again lock their screen as they left their desk.

[...] After hundreds of reports from enterprise users who were affected by this, Chrome developer David Bienvenu stated he rolled back the change and disabled the feature.

For the rollback to take effect, users are required to restart the Chrome browser in order to pull down the new configuration.

Enterprise admins are furious that Google has the ability to quietly enable features in their environment without even a heads up and provide no way for admins to block these changes.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by toddestan on Saturday November 16 2019, @06:59AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Saturday November 16 2019, @06:59AM (#920912)

    There's really no official builds of Chromium for Windows. You could pick a third party build, but that's the same as what Waterfox is to Firefox. If you run Linux, there's more than likely a Chromium version packaged up by your distro.

    I'm sure Microsoft will strip out all of Google's reporting and telemetry out of Chromium and replace it with their own. So it's up to you whether you trust Microsoft or Google more. Speaking of that, not all builds of Chromium strip that stuff out either.

    Opera is owned by the Chinese. Once again, up to you whether you want to trust them or not. At least in terms of features and functionality it's one of the better Chrome knock-offs. Not that I use it.

    As you said, Safari is a joke on anything other than the iPhone where you don't have a choice. Well, that's not true, it's a joke on the iPhone too.

    I'd use Firefox if I was you. Yes, it has its flaws but it's better than the alternatives as major browsers go.

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