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Has anyone rolled out Google Chrome to a medium / large organisation?

I would like to suggest it to our management (because I think it would work very nicely with some of our intranet applications), and I would like to find out what problems (if any) the rest of the world has been experiencing with it.

Have you found any problems?
I'm thinking of enterprise-level problems. I'm thinking that we can solve anything that requires a specific configuration / proxy setting / etc.
I don't really know what I think might be a problem, but I wonder if there are any usability problems that occur when non-geeks use it? Or problems which only rear their ugly heads when you've got 50 users all doing something unexpected.

Any helpful information or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

UPDATED: We tend to use Microsoft stuff, so Sharepoint, IIS, SQL Server, are typical building blocks of internal sites. (Thanks, @Jim, for reminding me to mention that).

Brent Ozar
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AJ.
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10 Answers10

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Only a handful of our (100 strong) IT team has it installed. I can't live without it. However, we still have to use IE or FF for certain intranet apps, as Chrome doesn't handle/render those apps correctly. (Or rather, yes I know, the pages aren't build to exacting standards - regardless, the problem exists)

You then have to consider this situation with non-technical users. Are you going to default Chrome? If so, how are the users going to know when it hasn't rendered a page correctly? How will they know to open IE or FF instead? To them, "it's all the interweb thing isn't it?".

I would personally say Chrome is several years away from being enterprise ready - certainly for our enterprise.

Izzy
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  • Thanks. I think you've nailed the right questions (better than I did). I'm afraid you might be right that it's not there yet. Still, I like to be thinking ahead (and encouraging others to think ahead too ;). – AJ. Jun 30 '09 at 14:14
  • I agree that it is a long way away from being enterprise ready, especially where enterprise means "built for IE". On the "interesting" side it is fairly unique in its installation - it sits entirely within the users profile and doesn't require elevated permissions to install. That's both a significant plus and a significant minus depending on how you view control issues. – Helvick Jun 30 '09 at 18:53
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This is an old question so this is hopefully answered elsewhere as well, but I found this when looking for group policy info for Google Chrome so it might help others who do the same to know that there is an admin template described at: http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer=146164

Boyce
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  • We're using the GPO for Chrome in our office. It's not as full-featured as IE, but it does give us some basic management. – CC. May 25 '11 at 20:50
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What features would you add to Firefox to get it into the enterprise?

You can apply most of these answers to Chrome.

Community
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Jindrich
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    Nice link thanks. For a vote, can you pick out the top 3 (or more) that you think would apply to chrome? – AJ. Jun 30 '09 at 14:15
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I'm assuming you're using an Active Directory environment with Windows XP clients. In which case, you'll find it pretty difficult to manage Chrome via Group Policy. The built-in support that IE7 has for Group Policy makes it extremely easy to manage over a large, diverse group of users.

I know it's brand-new and untested, but if you're looking for Chrome-esque features that you can manage, I would suggest testing IE8.

Russ Warren
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  • Nice point about group policy. Thanks. We are testing IE8, though (which will be an improvement on our current IE6!!). – AJ. Jun 30 '09 at 14:13
  • As much as I hate IE, I'd have to agree about the ease of management. Please do every one in your company and DO NOT go with IE 6 or 7. We're stuck on IE6 where I work and it makes me contemplate punching babies. Luckily, devs can install FF for "testing". – MattGWagner Jun 30 '09 at 18:16
  • Where I work our internal sites work almost perfectly in IE 6 or 7, work sometimes in FF and IE8, and barely work at all in Chrome. Keep in mind if everything is based off of IIS, ASP, and Frontpage type coding, it may only work in IE6 or 7. If you had a LAMP (or even any Apache-based setup) setup, I would say use anything except IE 6 or 7. – Joshua Nurczyk Jun 30 '09 at 19:08
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Chrome doesn't play nice with certain sharepoint web parts. I've personally run across quite a few compatibility problems with it on certain websites. Things easily handled by me, that I feel would confuse the average user.

Not to mention, isn't Chrome considered a Beta product?? Not something I'd role out to an Enterprise.

Jim March
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I use Chrome & like it, but sometimes have to revert to IE8 on some sites (like Outlook Web Access). Silverlight sites also require something other than Chrome, for now. So, for 99% of sites, I use Chrome. For the remaining 1%, I use IE8.

Other downside of Chrome is that there aren't enterprise policies that you can put in place. For IE, you can modify the group policy on the domain to set whatever policy you wish to propagate to clients. You won't have that option w/ Chrome.

Garrett
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bugfix response for chrome has been slower than other browsers,
thus they prevent it from running at work via windows policy controls.

Now that updates have started, wonder if they'll ever reverse that policy :-(

ericslaw
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  • -1 because some corporations have decided to prevent running chrome because security bugfixes were slow? Seemed relevant to the query to me. – ericslaw Jul 02 '09 at 19:51
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Aside from lack of management via GPOs (which is an essay in itself), your use of MS intranet technologies will mean that any browser that doesn't have ActiveX support, or even that has ActiveX but not to the same degree as IE, is effectively useless.

You're also going to be missing out on integrated authentication (unless Chrome supports it, I must be honest and say I've not tested that), meaning you've just doubled your user/password management overhead and have started leading your users down the path of yellow sticky notes.

Maximus Minimus
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Even for enterprises which studiously avoid reliance on Microsoft's tech, Chrome isn't quite ready for large rollouts internally. No silent installer without some funkiness in profiles, for example.

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You don't get any NTDLM domain credential pass through for intranet sites, which is very easy to manage in IE and doable in FF.

prestomation
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