[jve]

Yeah.

> We are running professional services for multi million dollar programs. Do you understand how many hours of resources were wasted by your 'experiment'? -- Angry sysadmin

Well, do they pay Google for testing in their environment?

Chrome is a free-to-use product. Their rollout strategy is good. Not that they experiment in prod - the flag was in beta for 5 months. And then they turned that on in prod for %1 users, still no reports.

Well what better could they do?

[curryst]

> Their rollout strategy is good.

Their rollout strategy was bad. They tested it on 1% of beta users for a month. They should have ramped it to 100% in beta before thinking about prod. Maybe 1% for a week, 25% for a week, 75% for a week then 100% for a week.

Then think about enabling it in prod. Testing on a subset of the subset of people that run beta is not enough to validate the functionality.

Even then, they probably should have done a ramp in prod as well. There are certain configurations that seem unlikely to be tested in beta. VDI is one that comes to mind. Headless operations also seem less likely to be running the beta build.

[oarsinsync]

> Their rollout strategy is good.

I think you've misunderstood what they did

> the flag was in beta for 5 months. And then they turned that on in prod for %1 users, still no reports.

It was in beta, had no reports, and then they turned it on for a subset of users, and created a flood of problems.

> Well what better could they do?

Release it in a new version that doesn't auto-enable for small subsets of people, but is enabled for everyone if they've deployed that version. It's how software releases used to work. Enterprise environments can then test before it gets rolled, and save this problem from occurring.

[blub]

Where are all the great browser alternatives we can get paid support for? Dead.

Your claims would make sense if Google hadn't destroyed the market for paid browsers and are now trying to kill what's left of the free market too (Safari & Firefox).

Who can compete with a product which receives tens of millions of dollars of investment per year and yet is given away for $0? US competition law is a joke, all regulators are asleep at the wheel.

[vanadium]

Making experiments opt-in seems like a good first step, no? As it is, there wasn’t even a clear opt-OUT.

[jacquesm]

Was there any opt-out at all? Even an unclear one would do, then at least users can point each other to the option.