Not a noob question... I don't know, but was assuming they were not worth the hassle from experience of using them, having lived through an era of binary diffs

Not a noob question... I don't know, but was assuming they were not worth the hassle from experience of using them, having lived through an era of binary diffs for old games where applying them seemed to be very computationally expensive at the time - sometimes to the point that it seemed faster to download a whole release, I assumed it was even more expensive to generate them - Those experiences may not be valid anymore in light of faster hardware or better algorithms, but the gains may also be too minimal when compared to highly granular packaging systems that various Linux distributions use these days. Sibling comment RE chrome is an interesting one, I can imagine in the specific case of very large and frequently updated binaries like chrome it would still be beneficial to use binary patching.