Unlike browsers of yesteryear’s (read Internet Explorer), the well liked Google Chrome has an ability to auto-update itself in the background.

While this feature is a designed in the browser so that you don’t have to deal with maintenance or security issues, it may cause unexpected issues when you’re working in a development or testing environment. A latest update may cause your earlier written programs/scripts to fail.google_chrome_stop_auto_updating

Even with UFT/QTP, I can see several questions on QTP communities where people complain that their scripts have stopped working after auto-upgrade of Google Chrome.

Google does not provide any built-in option to stop Chrome auto-update.

Here is how you can manipulate registry to stop Chrome from auto updates –

  1. Go to Start > Run > Type ‘regedit’ and hit Enter
  2. Under Registry Editor go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\
  3. Right click on Policies folder icon and Create > New > Key. Enter Google as folder icon name.
  4. Now right click on this newly created Google folder icon and create another key called Update
  5. Right click on Update and Create > New > DWORD Value
  6. Enter the name as AutoUpdateCheckPeriodMinutes
  7. Right click on this newly created entry, click on Modify and enter0 as Value data.

The structure should look like this

Registry Tree

Source: The Chromium Projects