I have tried Iron & Chromodo (Chrome clones) but they are slow on my computer. Google Chrome works faster most of the time, but when it calls home or auto-updates, doing so brings my old computer nearly to a stand-still. What (if anything) can I do to configure Google Chrome so that it NEVER calls home, & only checks for updates when I tell it to do so? ~~~~~~~~~~~~ P.S. I tried to search for an answer to my question, but I was limited to a single simple search box so I couldn't do a granular search. I wonder what happened to the more advanced search box.
What about Chromium? It doesn't come with Google Updates and it can be made to stop all extraneous network activity by using --disable-background-networking on the command line (of course it still needs some basic configuration to remove the rest of the requests to Google servers).
I have all the checkboxes under Settings/Privacy unchecked. Running AppGuard in lockdown mode I think helps against automatic updates. Anyways I run Chrome sandboxied, so it won't update from there. I am not really worried about Chrome sending information to it's home than something else on my computer from sending information out to someplace else. Nothing I can do since not knowing what it is.
Click on the Chrome menu Select Settings Click on the link titled ‘Show advanced settings‘ Under the section headed ‘System‘ untick the box next to “Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed” To reenable the feature simply repeat the steps above but reversing the final step.
If you have a professional (or higher) version of Windows, it can be done with Group Policy. Download the policy templates and use the one for Google Update. In the GPE, go to Conputer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Google (there will be one each for Chrome and Google Update if you install both) -> Google Update -> Applications -> Google Chrome. Select "Update Policy Override," set it to Enabled, and choose "Manual Updates only" in the drop-down menu. Then it will only check for an update when you select Help and About -> About Google Chrome in the browser.
@bellgamin Another possible option here could be to use a PortableApps version of Google Chrome. You would also have the choice between Stable, Beta, and Dev channel builds. http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/google_chrome_portable Or you could consider vanilla Chromium without any of the extra Google stuff. There are many places to get builds from, but here is one: http://chromium.woolyss.com/ Or you can use a reputable open source program such as http://sourceforge.net/projects/crupdater/ where you can pick and choose from Chromium builds and that application helps with the download/install process and can also help when you choose to update to another version. Plain Chromium is quite nice, quick and snappy, plus you can manually install PPAPI Flash Player for that if you need it. As you can see from other user replies, you can disable much of the phoning home that Google Chrome does but it is quite a bit of steps and you also can never be certain if Google reverts some of those changes from time to time.
You can disable scheduled tasks and set both Google update services to manual. This way you can run updates manually using Help and about - About Google Chrome.
Delete the Google Update folder in the Chrome folder. No more auto updating. Chrome will run fine without it. You will have to manually install the updated version and delete the folder again to update.
MANY thanks to all. I have installed Google Chrome & used Autoruns to disable the Task Scheduler items for Google update (as suggested by Honorable Kees-san, Minimalist-sahib, et alia, ESQ). Let us see what we shall see....... Aloha, bellgamin (XP forever!)
