Google is making it easier for IT admins to deploy and manage its Chrome browser in their businesses. The new Chrome Enterprise Bundle gives admins a single installer for the Chrome browser, the Chrome Legacy Browser Support extension for running the occasional ActiveX widget and a number of administrative policy templates.
With the launch of Chrome 58, Google’s browser now also offers official support for Citrix’s XenApp virtualization platform and Windows Server with Terminal services. Chrome 58 also offers support for GPU acceleration in Citrix environments, as well as roaming profiles and Windows Server auto-detection. The company plans to add additional tools to the bundle over time.
With this update, it’ll become easier for IT admins to deploy Chrome in their organizations. In many organizations — and especially large enterprises — Chrome still isn’t officially supported by IT. Instead, Internet Explorer (or Edge, if those organizations already updated to Windows 10) remains the standard.
Google also today said that the number of enterprises that use Chrome doubled over the course of the last two years. Sadly, a company spokesperson declined to give us any real numbers, so for all we know, that number could still be really low. The company was willing to share how it measures enterprise users, though: “We account for enterprise users based on attributes of their computer configuration, such as if the machine is joined to an active directory domain and if Chrome is being managed via admin-configured and/or deployed policies.”