Chrome 78 release on 22 October

Oct 17, 2019

Steve Jones
By Steve Jones

We received an email from a client asking about the new Chrome update.  Will Articulate products work with this version of Chrome?

We want to alert you to an important browser update which may impact your content. The upcoming release of the Google Chrome browser (Release 78) scheduled for release on 22 October contains a significant change which may impact course tracking in the OpenSesame player and LMS platforms.

Because of the potential impact on our mutual customers, we ask that you reply to this email by 9 October and notify us what your team is doing to prepare for this change. We plan to communicate to customers later this week and anticipate questions about publisher actions in response to the Chrome release.
Chrome 78 release on 22 October
The new Chrome release scheduled to come out on 22 October will disallow posts to external URLs to happen when the browser is closing or navigating away. As a result, courses which are authored to be marked complete on-exit or posting data to an external URL (most likely to be AICC in the browser or remote hosted SCORM) may no longer work. As a result, learners’ progression through courses might not be saved. After this release, learning management systems, particularly those recording completion on exit, may fail to receive completions under Chrome.

More information, including Google’s recommendations for a fix can be found here. Please see the section “Disallow sync XHR in page dismissal”. The quickest change is likely replacing your POST or GET requests with a FETCH having the keepAlive=true set. You can test using Chrome 78 by downloading it here.

 

Thanks, Steve.

 

37 Replies
Brian McCann
4 years ago02/25/20 at 9:15 pm (UTC)

I'm still seeing some issues with this in Chrome using SCORM. With Articulate Rise courses, they're set to send to the LMS the grade at 100% complete and that 100% is what shows up in the course as the learner sees it. However, when the user exits and returns to that course, the completion shows less (usually about 25% has been erased). In neither case does the completion pass to the "grade book" in the LMS.

Alyssa Gomez
4 years ago02/25/20 at 10:17 pm (UTC)

Hey Brian, happy to help!

When you published this course for LMS, it sounds like you selected Track using course completion: 100%. Is that right?

In your own testing, when you reach the final block of the last lesson and you exit the course, do you see that the course is marked as complete?

Also, is this an issue that you are able to reproduce when testing in SCORM Cloud? This will help determine if the issue lies within your LMS or the actual Rise 360 course itself. If you are able to replicate, be sure to send the published output file to us to take a peek.

Michael Prokš
4 years ago03/19/20 at 9:20 pm (UTC)

Hello, 

I have got problem maybe to this discussion. We have got a new version of Chrome (80) and suddenly my videos (embed from youtube and courses are in SCORM) doesn´t works and every fonts are changed (maybe to Times). 

Please, can you help me? I should change SCORM to AICC or anything else? If I change SCORM to AICC I lost results of courses...

Thank you. 

Leslie McKerchie
4 years ago03/20/20 at 2:18 pm (UTC)

Hi Karel and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)

Thanks for sharing what you are experiencing with your published course. 

Are you able to replicate the issue on SCORM Cloud or is this only happening in your LMS?

If you're able to replicate, then with your permission, I'd like you to share your project file with our support engineers to investigate what's happening. You can share it privately by uploading it here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.

Katie Riggio
4 years ago03/23/20 at 1:41 pm (UTC)

Happy Monday, Karel!

So sorry to hear you were unable to upload the file.

I'm opening a case so that we can communicate directly. You'll get an email from me shortly, and we'll work on our next steps from there!

For those who run into this error: Try clearing the browser cache or use a different browser. If this is happening across all browsers, be sure to reach out to us in E-Learning Heroes or email support@articulate.com 📧

Laurie Carrigan
almost 4 years ago06/29/20 at 6:25 pm (UTC)

Hi, I was wondering if there are any other directions or updates on this.  I package all of my courses in Rise as SCORM 1.2 because it is the only course my LMS will fully support.  I have an article that recommends Fetch keepalive and SendBeacon() options for XMLHttpRequest().  Is there any guidance on how to switch out XMLHttpRequest()  for eitehr Fetch or SendBeacon? 

Vincent Scoma
almost 4 years ago06/30/20 at 3:55 pm (UTC)

Hi Laurie,

Thank you for reaching out and letting us know! 

When completing your Rise 360 course in your LMS, is the course marked as complete? Also, are you able to recreate this issue in SCORM Cloud? Testing in SCORM Cloud will help determine if there is an issue with the Rise 360 course or if this is happening on the LMS side. 

If you can recreate the issue in SCORM Cloud, we are more than happy to take a closer look at the file. You can use this private link to share your course, and we'll let you know our findings after having a closer look!

Laurie Carrigan
almost 4 years ago06/30/20 at 4:45 pm (UTC)

Hi,  So I haven't tested it in Storm Cloud because I have tested it out so often in our LMS. The course doesn't complete because of this XMLHttpRequest issue with Chrome.  Not only doesn't it complete, it doesn't record the time spent in the course.  No data will flow from the course to an LMS system.  Now there are fixes as I mentioned, but I don't know javascripting to recode the course myself.  Unfortunately, I stuck having to export all courses as SCORM 1.2 because it is the only file my LMS will accept without major repacking. I would love to AICC, but as you can see from their article, the course package content requires a lot of work. I am also a bit stuck using Chrome because IE has it's own issues with other courses.  I have uploaded the course to link you provided.

https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/4664843055398912

https://web.dev/disallow-synchronous-xhr/

Robyn Millard
over 3 years ago10/08/20 at 3:01 am (UTC)

Our courses currently track ok with Chrome Version 80.  But with Version 88 coming out in early 2021, we can't relax the security settings any more than we have in Version 80.  Most LMS vendors have applied patches to enable the tracking to work, but Saba is apparently not going to be releasing a patch.

So what can we do to ensure tracking will work?  Can anyone comment on this?  Will we need to republish courses that were published in Storyline prior to the Storyline patch?  We've tried adding a Complete Course trigger prior to the Exit Course trigger, but found that didn't do anything because Storyline asks us to pick one or the other.

Given AllowSyncXHRInPageDismissal is being removed in Chrome version 88, will courses still track ok without having to do any work-arounds?

Katie Riggio
over 3 years ago10/09/20 at 6:19 pm (UTC)

Greetings, Robyn!

Thanks for writing in and for opening a case with our Engineers! I'll share my teammate Vevette's reply publicly in case others have similar questions:

SCORM and Tin Can API (xAPI) courses aren't impacted by Chrome disallowing synchronous XHR. They'll continue to work.

AICC courses, however, may be affected. You can republish those projects using these versions of Storyline that hold the fix:

Storyline 360: Update 35 or later
Storyline 3: Update 9 or later

From what I understand, if the LMS uses synchronous XHR, learner interactions that happen in the final few seconds before they close the browser tab might not get communicated to the LMS. It'll be worth testing if having a Completion trigger before a last slide would work on your LMS when synchronous XHR is disabled in Chrome.

Let us know if that helps! 

Mitch Lilla
over 3 years ago12/03/20 at 5:22 pm (UTC)

Hi there,

Our team is experiencing an issue with xAPI packages and Docebo. Much like others, we have users who are getting through 100% of the Articulate Rise xAPI package, but completion isn't being sent to the platform. Below is the most recent update we received from Docebo on a support ticket that is open with them:

If you have not played the package before and then play the package and then quickly close the package before all the requests are sent successfully, then the package is not marked as complete. This is due to the fact that not all requests are successfully sent. If you then play the package with the existing tracking data, no matter how much time you would wait the LO would remain not completed, due to the fact that the package is sending the status as "attempted" and not as "completed".

Essentially, if you cause the package to fail by closing it too quickly just once, it will never complete in other attempts and will need to be reset.

Now the answer to why this happens lies within the package itself, not the platform. Our recommendation here is to check with your content provider to change the request to use fetch instead of XHR (when the data is being sent from the package to the LMS) so that they are successfully sent. Additionally, you could add something in the package telling the user to wait a bit before closing the package.

How can our team go about resolving this issue so content is marked complete appropriately going forward?

Thanks for any assistance you're able to provide!

 

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