Improvements to Rechecking After a Browser Update

tl;dr: Now, when you restart your browser after an update, Kolide will automatically recheck issues so you don’t have to click the button manually! Check out the video.

One popular way to use Kolide is to require your end-users to keep their web browsers up-to-date.

The way it works is simple. First, Kolide continuously monitors the browser vendors’ update feeds (Firefox, Chrome, Brave, and Safari) for new updates. If a new update is found, it will check all the devices that use that browser to see if they have that update. If they do, they pass the check! If they don’t, they fail the check.

Once a device is failing a check, administrators can notify end-users about the problem, give them a reasonable time to do the update, and if they don’t, block that device from authenticating to sensitive apps.

This technique is often much better than attempting to centrally manage web browsers, and the inevitable data loss associated with automatically restarting the browser when the user might still be using it.

This use case is so popular, we found a way to make it a little better.

One thing that’s always been tricky is that in order for an end-user to update their web browser, they will need to restart it. But what happens if we ask a user to restart when blocked in the middle of the authentication flow?

Luckily, modern web browsers support the ability to restore tabs after they restart from an update, and even better, Kolide can remember the details of your authentication, so you can continue right where you left off!

But there’s one thing we could do better. Once that tab is restored, we know what the end-user wants to do next: they want us to immediately recheck to see if their browser is now on the correct version. Today, we make them click the button. But why? We should just do it for them.

And that’s exactly what we did. Check out the video below.

We hope that this small change improves your end-users’ experience using Kolide, which in this case means not thinking about us at all!