Since we launched the Chromium project over two years ago, we’ve been hearing a lot of feedback from IT administrators who want to manage and configure Google Chrome. Of course, we were eager to do what we could to help them get Chrome deployed inside their organizations.

Today, after talking directly to administrators and testing the features extensively with other organizations, we believe the first set of features is ready for prime-time. Both Chrome and Chromium are now manageable through Group Policy objects on Windows, plist/MCX configuration on Mac, and special JSON configuration files on Linux. We polished up the NTLM and Kerberos protocol support, and created a list of supported policies and administrative templates to help administrators deploy. For users needing access to older web applications not yet qualified for Chrome, we also developed Chrome Frame, an Internet Explorer (TM) plug-in that provides Chrome-quality rendering for the broader Web, while defaulting to host rendering for any web applications that still require IE.

No feature is really useful to an administrator without great documentation, so we wrote articles to help admins in the configuration and deployment of both Google Chrome and Chromium. We also documented answers to the top questions testers encountered when deploying.

Even though the first set of features is done, we still have a lot more we’d like to do. We have some interesting ideas that we’re working on, including more policies to manage everything in the content settings and authentication protocols, and interesting new ways to deploy policy cross-platform. But we could use your help: please try out the new features by checking out the documentation, downloading the MSI installer, and filing bugs. And let your administrator know to give it a try and let us know what they think.

Posted by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager and Daniel Clifford, Software Engineer