Google Chrome Experiment Goes Wrong! Crashes Thousands of Browsers and Enterprise Networks.

In a bitter setback for Google as an enterprise platform provider, thousands of Chrome users running on Windows Server “terminal server’ setups faced crash and uncertainty for the past two days. Reportedly, this is due to the new experiment by Google Chrome on November 13 that went horribly wrong.

According to sources, the impacted browsers were shooting the “White Screen of Death” (WSOD) error and all browser tabs are going blank. This may not sound serious to many but the significance of this issue is felt deeper among the enterprises which had their employees use chrome browsers on their enterprise environments. Since it’s not easy to change or add new browsers to the tightly controlled enterprise environment, the issue resulted in major loss of values and business.

According to Google Chrome design document, this is an experimental feature that suspends Chrome tabs when users move other app windows on top of Chrome, treating the active Chrome tab is a background tab.

The support team from Google addressed the issue by disabling the experiment by pushing a new configuration file. For those who still face the issue can disable the following flags manually on their browsers,

chrome://flags/#web-contents-occlusion

chrome://flags/#calculate-native-win-occlusion