
Chrome experiment crashes thousands of browsers and angers IT admins - dantondwa
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/15/20966237/google-chrome-white-tab-screen-crash-experiment-it-admins
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jimrandomh
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".

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perl4ever
How would you feel if this ethic was applied to your prescription medication?

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ThePowerOfFuet
It's called a human trial, and it's applied to all prescription medications.

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perl4ever
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?

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pasttense01
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=102483...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1024837)

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marmot777
Wow, this is surprising. Why would Google pull a stunt like this?

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Phillips126
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.

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marmot777
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.

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chopin
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.

