Google tried an experiment on the Chrome browser, which didn't go well at all, ending up crashing thousands of users' browsers for two days.
The problem occurred on Wednesday, November 13. Not all users. The problems occurred mainly on corporate networks.
Complaints and allegations
On Wednesday, many users began reporting that their Chrome tabs were suddenly going blank . This phenomenon is known as the “White Screen of Death” (WSOD) error.
The problem was big because thousands of company employees could not use Chrome to access the internet, resulting in them not being able to work properly.
In some companies, employees didn't have the option to switch browsers. This meant they couldn't access the internet. In turn, system couldn't replace Chrome with another browser.
Some of the user complaints:
“This had a huge impact on our call center as we were unable to chat with our members,” a Costco spokesperson said. “We spent a day and a half trying to resolve the issue.”.
"4,000 people were affected in my environment. We've been trying to fix this for 12 hours," said another.
“A day and a half of work was lost in a medium-sized call center with 40-60 employees,” added another.
“We faced the same problem as hundreds of other users. It took hours to resolve the issue,” was the comment of another user.
Hundreds of such complaints flooded Google's support forum.
Some people's first thoughts were that the empty tabs were a sign of a malware .
Google is fixing the problem
However, the main cause of the error was ultimately a new feature called “WebContents Occlusion.”
According to Google, this is a new feature (in experimental stage) that suspends Chrome tabs when users open other application windows on top of Chrome, leaving the active Chrome tab visible in the background.
The goal is to improve Chrome's resource usage when not actively in use.
Google was already testing the new feature in Chrome Canary and Chrome Beta versions. However, this week, it decided to test it in the stable version, to get more feedback.
However, as it seems, the feedback was very negative.
“The experiment was running in beta for 5 months,” said David Bienvenu, a engineer . On Tuesday morning, it was rolled out to the stable version.
“Before that, it had been tested on about 1% of M77 and M78 users for a month. But, unfortunately, there were no reports of problems,” he added.
The release of the feature to the stable version and the wider public did not have the desired and expected results. Instead of suspending Chrome tabs, the feature left the pages completely blank.
Users were trying to refresh the Chrome tab to regain access, but in some cases this resulted in the loss of their last actions.
The Chrome team said it has ended the experiment, via the Finch system, so no users are affected anymore.
However, if there is any user who is still facing this issue, they can disable the feature themselves:
chrome://flags/#web-contents-occlusion
chrome://flags/#calculate-native-win-occlusion
The correction brought more criticism
Fixing the problem made system administrators even angrier. Why? Because most people didn't know that Chrome engineers can experiment on their Chrome systems, and that they can make changes to everyone's browsers without getting approval from users.
“Do you see what you have done to thousands of people without any warning or explanation? We are not your guinea pigs,” said an angry system administrator. “We run professional services for multi-million dollar projects. Do you realize how many hours were wasted by your ‘experiment’?”
"How many tens of thousands of dollars did this cost everyone? This is a very big mistake by Google," added another.
There were many other statements. Although it only lasted two days, this incident is on the list of the biggest mistakes of the Chrome team. Many users demanded an official apology from Google, which is certainly deserved considering the huge financial consequences for many of the companies.
