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Issue 643883 link

Starred by 5 users

Issue metadata

Status: Untriaged
Owner: ----
Cc:
Components:
EstimatedDays: ----
NextAction: ----
OS: Linux , Windows , Chrome , Mac
Pri: 3
Type: Bug



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"New Printer on your network" notification is off-putting

Reported by tehgor...@gmail.com, Sep 3 2016

Issue description

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Install a printer on your LAN that Chrome can use for Google Cloud Print
2. See notification from Chrome about a new printer

What is the expected behavior?
* Browser shouldn't not bother user about printers

What went wrong?
Browser tells user about printers

Did this work before? N/A 

Chrome version: 52.0.2743.116  Channel: n/a
OS Version: OS X 10.11.6
Flash Version: Shockwave Flash 22.0 r0

This is not an urgent issue, but I thought I'd say this seems like a wrong approach:

* Popping this notification up when a new printer becomes visible is distracting to users, whom certainly might print from their browsers, but probably don't generally do that.
* Having not tried this on a giant corporate LAN, I wonder what happens when users are notified about printers they can't physically access.
* For more technical users, this popup tells them their browser is doing something unexpected (sniffing for network printers all the time), which lowers trust in the software.
* There is no obvious way (at least in current stable builds?) to opt-out of this; there is a checkbox in the advanced options to turn off the notifications, but no apparent way to stop Chrome listening for cloud printers.

If I had to recommend a solution, it would be:
- either ask the user if they want to use Cloud Printer support, or at least have an opt-out mechanism (either a checkbox in advanced settings or a "stop listening for network printers" button on the notifications).
- Remove the notification and just list Cloud Printers in the print dialog, where no one would think it weird that Chrome is looking for and displaying available network printers.

I assume the notification is due to a broadcast from the printer and not Chrome trolling the LAN for devices, and in such a case, maybe it just makes sense to leave everything exactly where it is and just remove the notification UI completely.

Anyhow, that's my soapbox speech.  :)   I'll leave it to y'all to decide what's appropriate from here.

Thanks,
--ryan.
 
Screen Shot 2016-09-01 at 12.38.22 PM.png
70.7 KB View Download
Components: Services>CloudPrint
Labels: -Pri-2 OS-Chrome OS-Linux OS-Windows Pri-3
Status: Untriaged (was: Unconfirmed)
Thanks for the suggestions. Just flipping some form boxes for now. Will think about it a bit more later.

Comment 2 by ager...@cgps.org, Jul 24 2017

I strongly support making this feature disabled by default, or a the very least a preference that can be managed by a network admin. I dont see a key for it in any of the listed policies: https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3
Cc: bblietz@chromium.org jayhlee@google.com
Labels: Hotlist-Enterprise
+ bblietz@, Could you please help to triage and prioritize this FR?

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