Heads Up: Google Chrome 78 may cause problems for SCORM courses

[RodWard]

I just saw this post from Rustici Software, the people behind SCORM Cloud LMS.

https://support.scorm.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035814314-Blocked-SCORM-Exit-Postbacks-with-Google-Ch...

This new version of Chrome will ship in late October 2019.  If your userbase has many Google Chrome users, and you suddenly start getting lots of complaints about LMS completion not being recorded, this might be the reason.

[jsv1]

Hi Rod,

Thanks for sharing this. Do you know if this is specific only for LMS's that use the Rustici Engine player? 

[RodWard]

It's too early to tell what the impact will be since the version of Chrome hasn't actually been released as far as I know. I posted this when I saw it on the Rustici blog because I know that Captivate uses SCORM code from Rustici in their output. We might be lucky and find that only LMSs that happen to use SCORM drivers supplied by Rustici are affected and Captivate's code keeps working regardless. But in my experience in this industry you rarely have lucky breaks.

[jsv1]

I checked in with Rustici. Here's what they told me:

"Hello Jose 

Thanks for your message. While this does potentially affect all of our Engine clients, any LMS that uses scripts to perform synchronous requests during the beforeunload and unload events of a page will be affected.

Blocked SCORM Exit Postbacks with Google Chrome 78 and Above

We're currently in the process of upgrading and patching all our clients in preparation of this update.

Thanks
R***"

From their reply it sounds like it's more of an LMS problem than an authoring tool problem. That's the silver lining. We're checking with our LMS provider to see how this will affect us (if at all). 

Again, thanks for posting this, Rod! Appreciate your contributions to this field.

[RodWard]

I wouldn't be too sure that it will only be affecting the LMS side of this equation.  I just did a text search on a Captivate published HTML5 SCORM to see if there were any instances of just ONE of the JS code functions that Rustici said would be broken by the change to Chrome and this is what I found:

Does that look promising to you?