Sadly this doesn't happen sometimes as people still don't upgrade, but most do which is fine for me. I hope it stays that way.

As for crashes, that's pretty bad to be sure, but I didn't see the OP try filling a bug-report.

1. Violation of stated policies

If you tell me I can disable updating and then update anyway, I have been lied to. A promise was broken, an expectation violated. It is totally reasonable for him to be upset about this.

2. The excessive harassment of a tiny minority of users.

Several people in this thread have lauded the default nature of Chrome updates, and they're right! But it is that very default which makes the harassing banners and warnings all the more pernicious. Who is google bothering? The 99% of users we (as developers) care about and who haven't gone to great lengths to disable auto updating? No, they are only bothering the tech savvy, persistent, already annoyed user.

This is simply not where the burden of support comes from. As an anecdote the company I work for recently received a complaint that our website wasn't rendering properly. On investigation it turned out the user was trying to browse in lynx! While we're obviously disappointed that wordpress isn't lynx friendly we are going to spend 0 minutes trying to fix that.

I don't think they told him anything -- he just used an unofficial method to stop it that worked before, and then they changed it.

Conceptually, that was a helluva pain in the ass compared to simply downgrading to a working release.

That said: would I rather live in a world where everybody is running an up-to-date browser, even if that browser is occasionally buggy? Or would I rather live in a world where everybody is running a panoply of wildly out-of-date browsers, just because they're afraid to click "yes" on an upgrade? (I know plenty of less-tech-savvy people have been trained to never approve a dialogue box which they don't thoroughly grok; for them, browser and system updates, etc., will NEVER be applied.) The answer is very much the former. It's absolutely worth a rare bit of personal pain for the collective benefit of an up-to-date browser ecosystem.

I think what Google tries to do is to prevent sysadmins from doing with Chrome what they did with IE in the past. The average sysadmin loves to freeze things because that reduces the number of variables that matter for troubleshooting.

Updating in a corporate environment is very different from what you do at home or a small business. Some sectors require extensive testing before rolling out any change whatsoever.

In that case, they don't want things happening before they have tested any proposed changes.

When a package is blown down to the network with it's configuration locked (and set to not update), they don't expect a package to spontaneously start updating itself.

Google might let their browser ignore "no auto updates," but may find their browser losing market share in the corporate world. If they get booted, chances are 50/50 if the app ever make it back in the mix.

It doesn't take much.

If I wanted a closed ecosystem, I'd have chosen Apple. Google is becoming less and less appealing with every new decision they announce.

True, but let me continue that sentence: ... and as they have too little time for testing, they tend to resist all change.

There are a few very capable IT organisations that have a systematic approach to change. It would be a sensible thing to give them the necessary tools to manage change. One such tool is to delay browser updates.

But there are many more incompetent IT organisations that are overwhelmed and will keep the same browser version for 10 years if you let them.

I'm just making an observation. I don't know what the best solution is.

As for capable IT departments, on the large corporate scale, they fairly bulge with competent people. Obviously not everyone's a star, but they don't suffer idiots to live.

I don't upgrade anything until it's been on the street for a time. I let other people play canary.

I've honestly never heard of anyone having this crashing issue, and it sounds like an edge case. The author is also still on Windows 7, which is a 6-year-old OS and probably not the highest priority for Google's testing of Chrome.

A few isolated edge cases of problems like this are worth an overall safer, FAR easier-to-develop-for web.

While I agree that auto-update makes live a lot easier for web developers, i think this strategy of actively preventing users from running an older version requires more responsibility on the developers of Chrome to make sure the browser is stable.

In the past, when it didn't, people got stuck on old, insecure versions. There was a period of time (pre-Chrome) where people would replace IE with Firefox for their parents, and then their parents would be many versions behind.

Thanks for reminding me of more information that proves my point. If people aren't forced to update, many of them won't, and that makes all of us less safe.

This is actually an identical controversy to vaccinations. Saying that you're against automatic updates because 0.000001% of people have problems with them is the same argument that anti-vaxxers make.

If we let people who think they know what they're doing decide what browser version to run, then people who think they know what they're doing will decide what browsers version to run. It's not an acceptable tradeoff.

If you're an outlier and don't like it, just don't use Chrome.

Use the best tool for the job. I use Google Chrome for Googly things. I use Edge/IE for Microsofty things, and I use FF for the actual web. When javascript/Flash/HTML5 video in FF is too slow, I use Chromium.

I use Chrome for everything, and it all works great. I never have to switch to another browser the way you're describing. That sounds truly exhausting (as well as being inefficient and unnecessary).

When you're running on a tablet do you prefer to use Chrome over Edge?

I don't have to always switch either, but neither do I feel compelled to pigeon-hole my experience into a single browser.

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

  I understand why Google is doing this as I have had to trouble shoot a few virus laden pcs where the auto update was blocked by the virus by using the registry workaround written about in the post.
  I had to nuke the whole install and start from scratch. Just to be able to install the latest version of chrome

But of all the software I use, Chrome crashes the least (single tab page crashes very occasionally). I stopped using Firefox years ago for Chrome because Firefox crashed so much.

I would want to know why your Chrome crashes so much.

As for the problem of auto-updates, if you run Chromium on Linux, install it as root and run it as your normal user (as distributions usually do), then presumably it won't be able to update automatically.

There's nothing wrong with Google's updates except when they very rarely end up breaking something, but that's not the issue. It's that when someone has decided to block auto-updates from Google, it will still sometimes work around that to update itself.

99% of the people will likely want or not care if it auto-updates, but it shouldn't try and fuck over people that don't want that and expect that.

The quality control for OS X has been spiraling down the drain for several years. I've had tons of bizarre, work-stopping bugs on OS X lately. I had to stop using it except to build apps.

Dev-edition feels much more performant to me, plus it gets new features sooner than stable.

I know it won't be the same as when we all moved from IE to Firefox or Firefox to Chrome all those years ago, so I'm not in a hurry, and no Netflix in Firefox yet.

It's been the defacto browser for the modern web for as far back as I can remember without thinking too hard. (Like I know once upon a time I used some web spider search, and Netscape and IE6 forever... but I haven't realistically thought of a main browser other than chrome in forever).

But what does any of this have to do with desktop browser choices and auto-updates?

They're using the stock version of WebKit.

(I may have heard that Safari uses some otherwise-inaccessible APIs, but don't take my word for it.)

I wondered if maybe you meant that it had forked the Chromium webkit stuff, but it seems that Opera is using proprietary engines.

Source your claims, please?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)

However, it is, as rendering and JS goes, functionally a fork of Chrome, since as you'll notice from the source you cited, it uses Chrome's "Blink" rendering engine and Chrome's "V8" Javascript runtime.

Also from the link you cited:

>On 12 February 2013, Opera announced it would drop its own Presto engine in favour of WebKit as implemented by Google's Chrome browser, using code from the Chromium project. Opera Software also planned to contribute code to WebKit.[29] On 3 April 2013, Google announced that it would fork components from WebKit to form a new rendering engine known as Blink; the same day, Opera confirmed that it would follow Google in implementing Blink.[30]

>

>On 28 May 2013, a beta release of Opera 15 was made available,[31] the first version based on the Chromium project.[32][33] Many distinctive features of the previous versions were dropped, and Opera Mail was separated into a standalone application derived from Opera 12.[34]

Switched back in days.

1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-set-up-firefox...

2. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-firefox-android-sen...

Firefox Sync only syncs with versions of Firefox, and Chrome's sync only syncs with versions of Chrome, so they'd have to switch mobile browsers too just because they switched desktop browser (and unlike on desktop, I've found Firefox for Android to generally be clunkier to use than Chrome for Android).

And that second link is about Chromecasting from Firefox for Android, not the desktop browser. Being able to send stuff from desktop Chrome is definitely a convenience someone could get accustomed to.

Also, Chromecast is just amazing. It works with Netflix, Hulu, YouTube etc. Browse for videos on the website, because it's usually easier to click than to do weird controller motions => chromecast. Back to coding. DONE.

I have no hard numbers or evidence for performance, but that was just my feeling.

That may be a deal-breaker for you at the moment, but I believe that when Firefox's rendering engine switches to Servo, it's going to blow Chrome away on both desktop and mobile.