Google Chrome automatically update itself without asking

Posted September 14th, 2008 in Applications

Google Chrome appears to update itself automatically in the background without prompting the user whether it should do so or not. I only noticed this because my ESET Smart Security Center prompted me when I ran Chrome on the 7th warning me that the application had changed.

I checked the version number on the "About Google Chrome" window and it was showing 0.2.149.29 using Webkit 525.13. I checked my website's logs to confirm and discovered that when it was first released the version number was 0.2.149.27 so they must have made some minor improvements and these were automatically downloaded and installed.

I have noticed that the disappearing form elements issue seems to have sorted itself out (checkboxes on forms were forever disappearing, and would reappear in Chrome if I loaded the same page in Firefox) so it looks like they're working through any initial bugs they might have.

I took a look through my weblogs and the inital version reported was:

0.2.149.27 with WebKit 525.13

There's no .28 version in the logs.

Then from the night of September 6th and morning of September 7th (NZ time) the new version starts to appear, showing:

0.2.149.29 with WebKit 525.13

I guess one good thing about it automatically updating, assuming Google continue to do this, is that for us web developers we know that everyone should be using the most up to date version of Chrome, which isn't the case with other browsers. (Although Firefox is good at updating itself, with a user prompt, so within a major version most visitors are generally using the most recent version).