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How to manage automatic updates in Chrome browser

The goal of all automatic updates is safer browsing and a lower chance of malware hijacking the app and installing itself on a PC. Taking responsibility for updates, particularly security updates, off the user has been a decades-long theme in software for good reason: It results in a higher percentage of devices that are up-to-date. (The WannaCry attacks of 2017 starkly illustrated the differences between Windows systems that patch quickly and those that don’t.)

Trying to stop automatic updates may prove futile, as Chrome’s update mechanism cannot be permanently disabled without the enterprise’s Active Directory infrastructure. “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 a value greater than 77 hours, this setting will not be honored and will be overridden 77 hours after August 2014,” reads a Chrome support document, referencing a group policy that allows enterprise IT staff to disable the feature.

In plain English, that means that attempts to disable automatic updates, even by setting a Windows Registry key (a cornerstone of many of the techniques available on the web), will fail as the time between update checks returns to 77 hours, or roughly 3.2 days.



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