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I’ve been always uneasy with the “crazy things” Chrome does on Windows, mainly because of my general dislike for apps that disregard important vendor recommenda

I’ve been always uneasy with the “crazy things” Chrome does on Windows, mainly because of my general dislike for apps that disregard important vendor recommendations like where programs should be installed. I understand that the main upside for Chrome is the unobtrusive automatic updates. What I would like to know is what are the possible downsides. Do you or anyone else know about any discussion about that or research into that? (By the way, another modern app that uses appdata instead of programfiles on Windows is Dropbox.)

vetinari 15y ago
Consider it ~/bin, on Unices, it is a standard way to do user installations. If there was system-wide vendor neutral update mechanism, (like apt in Debian/Ubuntu, for example), I'm sure that Chrome team would use it in place of their own home-grown solution.
- kmm 15y ago
  I doubt it, as no single packet manager has delta updates, which is a crucial asset of their own solution. More importantly, they have no control over what comes in and goes out of the repositories. I doubt Google would want to deal with every single distribution personally.
  - nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
    Google's solution for Chrome on Debian and Ubuntu is to distribute a .deb package that installs not only Chrome, but also installs a reference to their own package repository. When the user updates packages on their system, it updates Chrome from Google's repository. Chrome does not update itself, nor can it, since the package installs it to /usr/bin, which would require a su/sudo prompt to get access to.
TimGebhardt 15y ago
This is pretty normal. Microsoft itself even endorses this: The .NET Framework has a installation framework built into it (analogous to Java WebStart) called ClickOnce. It's a framework that doesn't require administrator access to install programs, but if you do that then you can't install programs to Program Files. So it installs the apps on a per-user basis to AppData.

vetinari 15y ago

Consider it ~/bin, on Unices, it is a standard way to do user installations. If there was system-wide vendor neutral update mechanism, (like apt in Debian/Ubuntu, for example), I'm sure that Chrome team would use it in place of their own home-grown solution.

kmm 15y ago
I doubt it, as no single packet manager has delta updates, which is a crucial asset of their own solution. More importantly, they have no control over what comes in and goes out of the repositories. I doubt Google would want to deal with every single distribution personally.
- nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
  Google's solution for Chrome on Debian and Ubuntu is to distribute a .deb package that installs not only Chrome, but also installs a reference to their own package repository. When the user updates packages on their system, it updates Chrome from Google's repository. Chrome does not update itself, nor can it, since the package installs it to /usr/bin, which would require a su/sudo prompt to get access to.

TimGebhardt 15y ago

This is pretty normal. Microsoft itself even endorses this: The .NET Framework has a installation framework built into it (analogous to Java WebStart) called ClickOnce. It's a framework that doesn't require administrator access to install programs, but if you do that then you can't install programs to Program Files. So it installs the apps on a per-user basis to AppData.