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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: 2) by driverless on Sunday November 17 2019, @02:53AM (3 children)
My problem with Firefox is twofold, the political one is that if I wanted a crappy Chrome clone I'd just run Chrome directly, the technical one is that since Firefox is now an also-ran there are lots of web sites that simply don't work with it, mostly ones that require some sort of auth and/or use anti-bot checks, for which Firefox is detected as a non-kosher agent. For those I keep a copy of Chrome installed, in the same way that it used to be "site X doesn't work with my browser, I'll fall back to MSIE and then it'll work", it's now "site X does't work with Firefox, I'll fall back to Chrome and then it'll work".
Oh, and one thing I universally use Chrome for is printing web pages. For fscks sake Mozilla how hard can it be to render the same thing to a screen GDI and a print GDI? How come every browser I've ever used manages to get printing mostly right except Firefox?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Sunday November 17 2019, @02:51PM
Hmmm, while there are certainly a political issues with Firefox, that's not what I would have pegged them as :-p
- Ousting their CEO because he donated privately to the wrong side of an issue on the ballot.
- Blocking the Gab plugin for non technical, non security, non legal reasons (political evangelists in Mozilla wanting to do it is not a good reason.)
IMO Microsoft and Google are arguably better proponents of 'free speech' than Firefox these days, and that is a terrible statement.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @03:12AM (1 child)
Nearly every time I have printed a web page, text content gets the top half cut off the first page and put on the second.
The last time I printed a web page, either the browser or the site thought the printer was a mobile device and promptly reformatted the page as if it was a phone. Huge images and big buttons, ballooning the number of printed pages 300%.
Printing from browsers sucks and has always sucked.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday November 18 2019, @03:19AM
Chrome is actually not bad, it mostly works, while Firefox mostly doesn't work. As you say, there's text cut off, images cut in half, images blank, everything printed in 36-point text when the screen display is 12-point so two web pages come out as 15 print pages, and a Firefox specialty, dozens of pages with nothing on them but a header and footer, everything else blank.
How can you actually implement print functionality that's that broken? Firefox should just disable it to save trees rather than pretending they have something that works.