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Google Upgrades Chrome To Beta For OS X, Linux
wkurzius writes with this nugget from Mac Rumors: "As anticipated, Google has finally released an official beta version of its Chrome browser for Mac. The initial beta version, termed Build 4.0.249.30, requires Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, and is only compatible with Intel-based Macs."
And hierofalcon writes with word that Chrome has also been made available as an official Linux Beta.
Well, I use google calendar, google search, google mail, google voice, google maps... If google doesn't know what I'm doing by now, they are doing something wrong.
You make it sound evil. Most people don't want to be nagged with constant update reminders. In fact, most people will ignore those reminders, leaving them vulnerable to security exploits. Hence, Google has built an updater which can automatically install updates in the background. Remarkably, it manages to do this without ever asking you to reboot or even to restart the program being updated, which cannot be said of any other software updater I've ever seen.
The complaint is that it is a separate updater process, it runs itself at boot time, and it is difficult to prevent it from doing so.
Firefox, by comparison, updates itself when it starts up, and periodically checks for updates while you are online.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I am personally not deeply troubled by this behavior. I like having the latest version of Chrome running on my machine. That being said, they really should let users opt out (or, better yet, make it an opt-in on first launch) of automatic updates. And, to my knowledge the keystone auto updating is the behavior on Mac and Windows. In Linux, it just uses apt. I don't have any issue with the Linux behavior, except that they might add a dialog informing the user that they're modifying /etc/apt/sources.list during the install.
You have to remember that there are two sides to this coin: with auto updates turned on, you are vulnerable to any bugs that may be introduced by an update and to any nefarious / evil conduct from Google as darkly insinuated by the above poster. Conversely, without auto updates, you are vulnerable to any security issues that the updates fix. Frankly, the later concerns me a lot more than the former, and I suspect most of the non-tin-foil-hat-wearing community would concur.