After complaints, Google was forced to reveal it had launched an experiment on stable versions of Chrome that had changed the browsers behavior. Google had simply flipped the switch on a flag to enable a new WebContents Occlusion feature thats designed to suspend Chrome tabs when you move other apps on top of them and reduce resource usage when the browser isnt in use.
The experiment / flag has been on in beta for 5 months, explained David Bienvenu, a software engineer at Google, in a Chromium bug thread. Prior to that, it had been on for about one percent of M77 and M78 users for a month with no reports of issues, unfortunately.
Google rolled back the change late on Thursday night, following multiple reports from businesses with thousands of users affected.
This has had a huge impact for all our Call Center agents and not being able to chat with our members, explained a Costco IT admin in the Chromium thread.
It has left IT admins angry that theyve wasted valuable resources and time on trying to fix issues in their environment, and questions over why Google decided to make a silent change to Chrome in the first place.
Original article