Publishing Google Chrome in a XenApp Environment


Your users are asking if Google Chrome can be published in the your XenApp environment.  A Citrix Administrator would think, "sure that is easy".  The Citrix Administrator installs basic Chrome on the XenApp servers and publishes the application like every other.   The administrator will soon discover that it is not as straight forward as one may seem.  The following errors and issues can occur:


The administrator can publish the Google Chrome application and it works fine for non-flash based websites. If the user browses to a flash based website, the Chrome browser flash plugin crashes.

To resolve this issue, you will need to disable the native flash in Chrome and have it default to Adobe Flash.  In order to do this, you will need to add the command "disable-bundled-ppapi-flash" to the location command line in the published application settings. This command disables the native flash.  Below is the full recommended string to use when publishing Google Chrome.  Please note, before publishing this into production, test first to make sure it all sites can be accessed.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-bundled-ppapi-flash --no-default-browser-check --allow-no-sandbox-job --disable-gpu

Your users receive:  Your profile can not be used because it is from a newer version of Google Chrome.  

If you have the consumer version of Chrome installed in your environment, Chrome creates local profiles under %appdata%.  So if you have mixed versions of Google Chrome installed in your Citrix environment, it can corrupt your profile.  To resolve this issue, install Google Chrome for Business which will install in the local Program Files folder instead.


I would also like to share some great sites that discuss Google Chrome and Citrix environments.

Publishing Chrome in a Citrix virtualized environment

Google Chrome Becomes Unresponsive when Started as Published Application


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