I’ve been a Google Chrome user for so many years, I can’t remember when I switched. It’s been my favorite browser for a long time — I remember being blown away by how fast it was compared with Firefox, and while Mozilla has improved its browser significantly since 2008, Chrome still feels faster in many cases. I’m going to miss Chrome — but I’m no longer willing to tolerate the way Google handles the update process. It’s incredibly user-hostile and it’s based on a myth of infallibility.

Up until January 2014, I never gave a thought to Chrome’s frequent auto-updates. Then I got hit with version 32.0.1700, and my experience went straight to hell. Chrome began crashing upwards of 20x a day, typically without the option to recover the previous session. In some cases, I’d initiate recovery and the browser would crash before finishing the process. I tried all of the troubleshooting techniques I could find online and a few standard solutions, like disabling GPU acceleration. Nothing worked.

That’s when I discovered that Google monitors the Internet and forbids anyone from offering old versions of Chrome to download. File aggregation sites like OldVersion.com and FileHippo don’t archive Chrome. FileHippo has a notice that states Google’s policies disallow the site from offering downloads. I found a few downloads for the early version of Chrome, but all I wanted to do was step back to version 31 — and at the time, I couldn’t find it anywhere. In the end, I downloaded a beta version of Chromium.

After my experience with Chrome 32, I wanted to make certain I wasn’t caught by surprise again. Unfortunately, Chrome’s auto-update policy is deliberately difficult to use. Originally, you could disable Chrome’s Auto-Update via registry values. Google felt this was insecure, however, and mandated that you have to be able to edit group policies in Windows in order to make these changes. By default, that restricts auto-update control only to Windows 7 or Windows 8 Professional. Luckily, I have Windows 7 Pro, so I disabled the update process and went on my way.

Google Auto-Updates anyway

Last August, I logged into my system and found that Chrome had been updated. It turns out that Google had made changes to its own update process. It was no longer sufficient to set the “Auto-Update Check Period Override” to 0, as it had been. Now, the company’s help pages contained the following: “Warning: To prevent abuse of this policy, if a device is not joined to an Active Directory domain, and if this policy has been set to 0 or to a value greater than 77 hours, this setting will not be honored and replaced by 77 hours after August 2014. If you are affected by this, and still want to disable Chrome updates (NOT RECOMMENDED), you may do so by using ‘Update policy override’ as described.”

In other words, Google was still able to reach into my machine and forcibly update my software. I made the appropriate additional changes described above and again went about my business. It turns out, Google really hates it when you do that. I began to see pop-ups, at least once a day, telling me that I needed to update Google Chrome manually. Google services like Gmail or Google Drive would embed a yellow banner (shown below) when I attempted to use them. The banner would pop up every single time I used a Google service, and apparently can’t be dismissed or blocked.

Then, last week, I stopped getting the errors. I checked my Google version and discovered I’m now running 44.0.2403.89. My policy settings haven’t changed. The only way to set them is by manually editing gpedit.msc, and that’s not a command you enter accidentally. My Downloads folder indicates that I haven’t downloaded Chrome’s installer for more than a year. Somehow, and entirely not by choice, I’m running a new browser version.

I’m aware, of course, that the trend in software is to force users to install security updates by default, and if Google had only made security patches mandatory, I’d have little issue with the company. My problem with Chrome isn’t that Google pushed out a broken software version that crashed 20x a day on my primary system — my problem is that Google has made it virtually impossible to actually choose not to update your browser. You can’t opt out. You can’t install an older version. You can’t shut Auto Update off unless you own the professional version of the Windows OS (though there are hacks to allow gpedit.msc to run on other versions of Windows). Even once you’ve jumped through the hoops required to shut off Auto Update, Google retains the ability to turn it right back on. Windows 10 at least allows users to uninstall updates if they cause a problem. In Google’s world, every version is better than the last for everyone, period, without exception.

I still like Chrome, but I’m no longer willing to put up with Google’s lockdown and willingness to override its own update policies. Back to Firefox for me.

Update: Multiple readers have questioned how I knew my problem in January 2014 was caused by a Chrome update. I didn’t just troubleshoot my browser installation — I manually deleted all associated files and reinstalled from scratch, ran stress tests and evaluations on all of my hardware including both RAM and CPU, switched from an Nvidia to an AMD GPU, confirmed that the browser would crash with just one tab and one window open (meaning not a memory leak issue), manually monitored Chrome’s memory use through Process Explorer, and tried the standard troubleshooting techniques like removing all plugins and disabling GPU acceleration. None of it worked. I didn’t include all this in the initial story because the point was to focus on the inability to disable auto-updates, not the scenario that led me to do so in the first place, but since folks have been asking, there it is.