Having to wait for a security update to make it through the various update pipelines of all the different linux distros isn't a great situation for users either.

Installing browsers by hand in your homedir specifically so they can update themselves and you don't rely on the system package manager seems like a fairly widespread recommendation, but maybe I'm talking to a biased set of people.

> you don't rely on the system package manager seems like a fairly widespread recommendation.

Not from me to others using Fedora, the chrome you get via

    dnf install fedora-workstation-repositories

    dnf config-manager --set-enabled google-chrome

Is rapidly updated.

As a general rule I use what is in the repo's unless I absolutely can't or the version in the repo is so old that I can't.

I wrote a post about how Chrome's Linux updates work:

http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/08/zygote....

(Sorry to spam this thread multiple times with this, but it is very relevant.)

I feel your post is answering a different question than what I asked? You're answering "why is our process spawning model so obscure on Linux" rather than "why does Chrome not shove its updates down Linux users' throats out-of-band like it does on every other platform". (Unless you're suggesting the answer is the bit where you say they just didn't want to appear lame?)

That is the answer, yes.

Wow, that is lame.

Thankfully they don't. It's the package manager's job to update packages and the vendor's job to repackage upstream.