Managing Chrome Updates is a nightmare?
It appears that managing updates to Google Chrome is a complete nightmare when working with TestComplete. I am curious how others manage this. This week Google pushed out Chrome 42 and all my PCs...
Forum Discussion
Turn off automatic updates in Chrome?
How do you do that? Chrome stopped honoring Registry settings to disable udpates and it appears the only way to manage this now is through Group Policy changes? I don't know much about Group Policy settings and I am guessing this is something my IT department would have to manage and that I can't control on my test PCs? Is that so?
Hi,
> How do you do that? Chrome stopped honoring Registry settings to disable udpates and it appears the only way to manage this now is through Group Policy changes?
Personally I used to navigate to c:\users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Google\ folder and rename the Update folder to something else.
joseph_michaudStaff
> How do you do that? Chrome stopped honoring Registry settings to disable udpates...
Can you verify that please? The Chrome Settings article ( http://support.smartbear.com/viewarticle/62859/#Settings ) talks about Disabling Automatic Updates. The registry setting it refers to still seems to work for me. When I set
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Update\UpdateDefaultto 0, the About Chrome page tells me that updates are disabled. (I'm now updated to Chrome 42...)Are you using the stable, beta, or dev release?
Yes, Google Chrome ignores the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Update\UpdateDefault setting. This used to work but no longer. If you have this set to 0 the About page in Chrome will show "Updates are disabled by the administrator" but the updates are still applied.
I have this setting as 0 on all my PCs and Chrome updated from 41 to 42 recently on its own.
- joseph_michaud
> Chrome ignores the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Update
\UpdateDefault setting (Hmm. This is annoying...) I wanted to test your assertion but I cannot find an offline version of Chrome 41.
"Warning: Turning off auto-updates should be done with caution. You may not receive the latest security updates if you do not auto-update."
You think maybe there is a reason Google warns you about this? :smileylol:
Anyhow for those that throw caution to the wind this is straight from the Google team:
http://dev.chromium.org/administrators/turning-off-auto-updates
Agree with Ryan. This is rudamentary stuff. I dont work with the Chrome plugin but I would hope that the Test Complete developers test on the Beta version and have patches ready to roll out the day the changes go into Chrome. I worked with a web based product for a couple of years that only had support for Chrome and that development team always had time to prepare before a breaking change went into Chrome. Also, as QA we tested on Beta to be ready for any changes.
"cannot find an offline version of Chrome 41"
This is what makes Chrome even more annoying. Stopping the **bleep** thing auto-updating is annoying enough. And it usually finds a way, no matter what you do.
And then, to make matters worse, finding an installer for an older version is nigh on impossible. FileHippo used to have them, but not any more.
Personally, I simply keep a copy of the offline installer of a current working version of Chrome. If things get out of sync, I just uninstall Chrome, re-install, and then do all the usual stuff with trying to stop it updating. (Still have to try Alex's folder renaming method!) So at least I have a way to go backwards rather than simply being stuck with broken software. This usually keeps me going until patches arrive.
That said, I only maintain my own PC and a couple of VM's. I wouldn't want to have to back-install 42 PC's either.
Why they can't just have an option to allow you to choose when updates are installed (you know, like every other piece of software on the planet) is beyond me .....
