[masklinn]

Of course you can (disclaimer edition note: but it's not necessarily for the faint of heart, and isn't officially supported. On their updater and update policy, Google manages to be worse than Apple on Windows, which is already pretty fucking bad).

1. On Windows and OSX (at least), the actual updating is performed by a single service running in the background for all Google applications (the Google Updater). This service is installed and/or activated by all Google applications, every time you install them (or run them, in OSX, not sure for Windows). I'm sure you can find how to do the same in Windows but my know-how is not good enough, but in OSX you can disable GUS forever by uninstalling it, emptying its directory and then setting it write-only. This way, it's not possible for GUS to be reinstalled.

2. A good enough outbound firewall (I'm partial towards Little Snitch on OSX) will allow you to block connections to the update server, and make GUS unable to query it, and therefore to update Chrome without your consent.

[barrkel]

On Windows, Autoruns from SysInternals (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.asp...) works fairly well for finding out about these things that happen automatically, and disabling them, as easy as unchecking a checkbox. There's at two categories relevant to googleupdate: CurrentVersion\Run, and Task Scheduler.

[barrkel]

Too late to edit: there's a third one, in Services, on my machine gupdate1ca54[more hex digits] - it also links to googleupdate.exe.

[aj]

Ugh, of course, there are work-arounds. But if you re-read my comment, I said it is hardcoded in Chrome. I was talking about Chrome.

Another point: Your method will disable all google updates (google toolbar, google talk etc) which is a good side effect imo but not necessarily desirable by all.

[barrkel]

It's not hardcoded in Chrome, at least on Windows it's not. I'm currently running 4.1.249.1045, which I gather isn't particularly recent, because I seldom use it except for Facebook and other sites I don't trust to be logged in to for general browsing.

[aj]

Please do check and tell if you have the Google Updater service running and that it is working fine?

Else, please tell how you managed to turn off automatic updates in Google Chrome?

[barrkel]

Google Updater is not running. I turned it off with Autoruns, like I said in my other comment.

[aj]

Then how is that NOT a workaround? You are simply putting forth an argument which does even pertain to the point I was making.

[barrkel]

aj, you said expressly, twice, "that is a feature that Google has hardcoded into Chrome. You CANNOT disable auto-updates", "hardcoded in Chrome".

Your statement is factually incorrect. That's my point.

It is not "hardcoded in Chrome". It's a separate application altogether, and it's soft-configured in Windows, not hard-coded into Chrome. The fact that it's soft-configured in the Windows registry, using documented APIs, means that it is easily disabled; there's even a utility written by MS employees, on the MS website, for such software configuration. I take hard-coded to mean that there's code built in to Chrome which tries to auto-update on startup, in an unavoidable fashion. But there isn't. It's not hard coded.