Prasetya Weblog

Google Chrome is awesome. For real. Those of you who haven’t tried it are strongly encouraged to at least try using it for several minutes. There’s buzz about this new browser all around the web, and this short post is yet another one

Google Chrome is available for download from http://www.google.com/chrome, a small 400+ KB app which will download the real browser from Google server, some 8+ MB at the time of writing. This should be okay for people with fast connection and bandwith to spare, but people running on dial-ups will find this annoying. Downloading 8+ MB of installer everytime one want to reinstall Chrome? Not good.

After searching the web for 10 seconds, I found out that there’s a direct link to the actual Chrome installer, straight from Google server itself! Tada:

http://dl.google.com/chrome/install/154.25/chrome_installer.exe

The problem is, Chrome is rapidly evolving, so version 154.25 will soon be replaced. The trick is, just replace the version on the link with the new one, so assume version 155.55 is out, just replace the 154.25 with 155.55, it’s that easy and you’ll actually get the newest version. It works so far for me, though. Note that 154.25 is the ‘minor’ number, while the ‘major’ number is currently 0.4 at the moment, so the full release is 0.4.154.25.

AFAIK, the direct link doesn’t include the installation of Google Updater, which means three things:

• Less strain on your system by not installing additional service and resident app on memory. Though it is easily removed using Autoruns.
• You can’t update Google Chrome using the built-in updater (Wrench Icon > About Google Chrome), since it relies on Google Updater.
• If you want to update, download the latest build manually.

Google Chrome by default checks for updates every five hours and installs them (if any) automatically. By looking at the fast development of the browser we can safely say that there’ll be updates every now and then. For those who always want the bleeding edge version, the offline installer might not be the preferable choice.

Other versions of Google Chrome, although unofficial, are portables. These were packaged by some guys, and currently I have collected two of them:

• One made by a German blogger, and named, of course, Portable Google Chrome. The blog is here, and this is the download that links to some apps he’s working.
• The other is Iron, another packaged by, interestingly, German (again) software developer company, SRWare. The website is here (German) and here (English), and the Iron page here. They claim that Iron is built straight from Chromium (the open-source project behind Chrome), and have some security and privacy advantage over the original Chrome.

Another? I just know two of them, there might be more, made with the PortableApps launcher or ThinApp, I suppose. I have seen those, but I was reluctant to try.

Okay, so short an article for Google Chrome, one verdict: a good browser. Period.

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