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Comment by omh | Hacker News Reader

This change didn't come from a binary update.

We were affected and our version hadn't changed (in fact we weren't quite on the latest version - we were still testing it). We have updates disabled and are very much aware of how to manage this.

Google changed a feature flag that was automatically picked up by existing copies of Chrome and changed their behaviour.

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If Chrome is critical to your company, shouldn't you be testing on Beta before it goes stable? In this case, the feature was enabled on Beta for 5 months, yet not a single impacted company caught it. Even with 1% enabled, no one caught and reported it.

This is explicit. Binary changes and flag flips are very strongly split. This is almost always a good thing, as it means you don't need to roll back binaries to revert problems.

I can see the benefits when thinking about consumers.

I think the difference here is to do with who's responsible for keeping things "working".

In a business environment there is a whole IT department who go to a lot of trouble to guarantee that their colleagues can continue working. But when Google take that control there's a clash, and it hinders the IT team's capabilities.

Yeah, the issue here is this should be manageable via GPO or similar equivalent.

Whoa, that wasn't clear in the article. Thanks for enlightening me!

That was crystal clear on the article. Be honest you just read the title.

Right, I put a quote from the end of the article but I just read the title. /s

In the bug thread, multiple orgs stated they tried to downgrade to the last version and encountered the exact same problem. This alone is going to leave orgs circumspect about their security and Chrome’s reliability, at the very least.

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