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Issue metadata

Status: WontFix
Owner: ----
Closed: Sep 2016
Components:
EstimatedDays: ----
NextAction: ----
OS: Mac
Pri: 3
Type: Bug



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Seemingly impossible to downgrade Chrome

Reported by rpbi...@gmail.com, Sep 7 2016

Issue description

Chrome Version       : 52.0.2743.116
URLs (if applicable) : N/A
OS version               : 10.11.6 (15G31)

This isn't really a bug report, but something that I consider a major UX flaw. The problem is that it's seemingly impossible to downgrade Chrome versions because the auto updater runs automatically and as of yet I've been unable to find a way to turn it off. I understand (and appreciate) the desire to keep Chrome as up to date as possible for everyone, but there are sometimes legitimate reasons to run a previous version of a web browser, and power users who know what they're doing shouldn't be prevented from doing so.

For reference, I'm trying to downgrade to 52 to work around this chromedriver bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromedriver/issues/detail?id=1484&can=1&start=0&num=100&q=tab&colspec=ID%20Status%20Pri%20Owner%20Summary&groupby=&sort=

Thanks.
 
Components: Internals>Installer
Status: WontFix (was: Unconfirmed)
Thanks for your report. Old versions of Chrome (older than current stable) are not shipped or supported. It's not likely that we will provide a supported path to downgrade to these non-supported versions.

You may want to look at:
https://www.chromium.org/administrators/turning-off-auto-updates
https://www.chromium.org/administrators/frequently-asked-questions

Note, in particular, that downgrading Chrome *may* cause profile data loss, since version N is not necessarily capable of handling a profile written by version N + 1.

Comment 3 by rpbi...@gmail.com, Sep 13 2016

Thanks for the response.

Regarding your first link, turning off auto updates: there seems to be no way to turn off auto updates on Mac (I had to follow the instructions in this answer, which I have no doubt is an unsupported workflow: http://stackoverflow.com/a/35939105/1953740)
If that's something that *should* be supported, I can open another issue.

Also, I have to say that the attitude of all past versions being unsupported seems very user-unfriendly. Am I to understand that the position of the Chrome team is that if a new version of Chrome has bugs that irreparably break certain supported workflows that are relied upon by a number of users, those users are expected to switch to a different browser rather than trying to use a past version of Chrome?

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