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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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Saturday November 16 2019, @10:56AM
A fair point. However, it seems to me that apps should use ~/.appname to store per-user configs/info and system-wide app configs/info should be in /etc/appname on *nix systems and /var/appname for runtime data. Most (but as you correctly point out, not all) applications do so.
This is approximated in Windows with %USERPROFILE%\appdata\[local|remote]\appname and %PROGRAMDATA%\appname or similar, although runtime data is generally store in the former (it's likely the latter with Chrome, causing the issue).
I'd expect you'd see centralization of such data on Windows more often than on *nix, since Windows systems are usually single-user-at-a-time environments -- except with Terminal Server.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr