One of the most attractive features of Google Chrome is its silent updates option which makes your life easier by managing your software update without bothering you for anything related to it.
However, this cool feature can create problems too. For example, if a company decides to install Google Chrome on all computers and ask all its employees to start using it, we will have a situation where thousands of Google Chrome Installations in a single office trying to check for updates and downloading updates. This will create problems for network admins there for sure!
So, here is how you can disable this feature, from Google’s help page.
Turning off Auto-Updates on Windows
To turn off auto-updates of Google Chrome on Windows, you need to instruct Google Update to not update it. To do this, you can either:
- Use the Google Update ADM templates provided on this page or as described in this article.
- Set the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Update\AutoUpdateCheckPeriodMinutes to the REG_SZ (string) value of “0”
More information about Google Update’s group policy support is here.
Turning off Auto-Updates on Mac
Note: By turning off auto update, you miss the opportunity to get updated to the latest security updates. You will need to keep a close eye on Google Chrome releases from time to time and keep your set of installations secure. I personally do not recommend disabling Google Chrome auto update.
