This will probably get downvoted quickly, but Chrome's updater is one of few things I quarantine on my machine. I just don't trust Google enough to let it run stuff that "works quietly in the background, never notifying you." The technology is interesting (though not exactly a rocket science and certainly not magical ... which it would've been if it could update a running instance of Chrome without restarting it), but I am wee bit uncomfortable letting a company who is in business of collecting data and tracking people to run anything in my background.
I just run the Canary build and get auto-updated nightly. Until Google does something egregious, why not just help them build a great browser as quickly as possible?
Google, and now Mozilla too, is essentially crowd-sourcing, hopefully throwing a few million extra eyes on the problem.
And you are within your right to do that. But for non-tech elite that either don't care or would make an uninformed decision it is magical that they continuously the best features and security available with zero effort.
I used to think the same way, but after letting the stable version do its thing for a while on several computers, mine and my relatives', with no issue whatsoever, I stopped worrying.
Sorry, I don't see the logic behind this. You basically imply that if something works well, it must be benign, and this is clearly not always the case.
The roof of your bedroom could fall off on you every night, however, it hasn't so far and you just assume that it won't because not assuming so would make your life horrible by say, making you sleep in the outdoor, which may be even more dangerous. Life is full of compromise, of course the next version of Google Chrome could wipe out your hard drive and post all your photos to 4chan without your consent, but based on a few evidences (Google being a reasonable company whose interest is not to mess with you, past positive experience with chrome etc) we choose to compromise and accept autoupdate because it's convenient and we consider the amount of evidence enough to trust it.
I haven't investigated this, but I'd guess you could add a "chrome" user, chown the chrome directory to that user, and basically give it permission only to touch the stuff in its own directory. Would that help allay concerns about auto-updating software?
There's some convenience/security tradeoff here anyway. I don't know about you, but I don't inspect the source code of most apps I install or update.
