> Even a "if you know this site to be safe, please read this knowledge base article (link)" and buried in that, amidst all the reasons you shouldn't use untrusted certs, are the instructions.

I don't think that's a bad way to go about it either, if it's sufficiently buried.

I'm primarily just thankful there's a workaround, hidden or not, given how many tech companies seem to respond to these things by disallowing them completely.

> I don't think that's a bad way to go about it either, if it's sufficiently buried.

Just put it in the manual. If experience has taught me anything, it's that "normal users" never read the manual.

If you keep up to date with commits on the chromium code repo, you'd see them change it from time to time. For a while it was 'youshallnotpass'.

You probably shouldn't be using an opensource project without at least a cursory glance at the code anyway, especially as a power user.

You're kidding right? You look at every commit of every open source app you use, or that a closed source app is built atop? For me, off the top of my head, that would mean, yes, Chrome, Firefox, the Linux Kernel, Libre Office, Android, VLC...probably plenty more that I am unaware are open source, and that's not even considering the dev tools to do my job. When would I actually have time to have a life?

Exactly. Reading the source of every program you used was certainly possible back in the 80's when the FOSS movement started; but nowadays, with every program being millions of lines of code, it's implausible to get through all that and still have time to actually use the software.

Not to mention background updating. I don't even know when Chrome has updated half the time, unless something stops working.

If you're on OSX/macOS (what a silly rebrand) then if you look in ~/Library/LaunchAgents (and possibly /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons) for any .plist from Google (or Keystone) in there and add

    <key>Disabled</key><true/>

under the first <dict> and then unload each file, e.g.

    launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.*

The auto-updating stops and stop them reloading after a reboot/logon.

Im not sure a cursory glance at the 25 millions lines of code will do much if you dont already know what to search.