Hacker News Reader

Comment by dickeytk | Hacker News Reader

Without knowing much about the team I really doubt this has much to do with remote work. It seems like a smart move to take pressure off team deliverables in general right now for a host of reasons.

View on HN

It's a mix of many things. Our teams all working remote for the first time and dealing with the same issues all people are dealing with. And then also at the same time if we put pressure on external developers with breaking changes or new bugs then it doesn't seem the right thing to do for users and developers at this time.

A lot of googlers are remote while caring for their children at home. This definitely reduces productivity.

Local schools are leaning heavily on chromebooks. They have checked them out to students without computers. Adding an os update to this would contribute to the chaos.

OS updates on ChromeOS are seamless and mostly go unnoticed by the user, FWIW.

Except when they move the launch bar from here to there or hide scrollbars or make any of a million other changes that cause your screen to no longer resemble the screenshot you're trying to learn from.

I updated a couple weeks ago and every tab was discarded when I tabbed away, reloaded when I tabbed back. It's better now. I can only imagine the problems that would cause for a school with a couple hundred of these checked out.

install session buddy from the chrome web store. it saves your tabs automatically, & even restores sessions containing a mix of tabs & web "apps" accordingly.

The only reason this is needed is because something was messed up with the core functionality. Same thing could happen with an API.

The focus on stability for now makes sense with a lot of people going remote.

Provided they go right. If the entire team is adapting to a new way of working it makes sense to hold off on new releases while you make sure you've got everything working right.

IIRC my school district (in WA state) pinned Chrome OS versions for a long time because the state standardized testing software required a specific Chrome version. Not sure off hand if that's still a problem.

>the state standardized testing software required a specific Chrome version

Sounds like that's the root cause of the issue.

Not everyone has access to a ton of bandwidth.

Stress can impact the human immune system and reduce our ability to fight off an infection, on that note alone it's worth adding some more slack to these important but not truly essential releases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com