What if it sucks down bandwidth when I'm on 3G? What if an update breaks something, and I'm in the middle of something that can't be updated? What if an update silently breaks the update process? Hrm!
I reference that in your mention of 3G bandwidth usage. Chrome updates should be fairly tiny and bandwidth-friendly. Not always, but more often than not.. Especially on a beta/dev channel.
> What if it sucks down bandwidth when I'm on 3G?
> What if an update breaks something, and I'm in the middle
> of something that can't be updated?
> What if an update silently breaks the update process?
Bottom line: The autoupdater makes sure I never care about the version of Chrome I'm running, just like a web app.
Then it risks costing me money, for doing something I've not chosen to do. For a feature described as "not worrying", that can be potentially very worrying.
For the vast majority of people, heading down this rabbit hole isn't worth the effort.
(On the flip-side, it would be nice if there was a magical "undo those updates to point in time X" feature in case something went wrong and you wanted to see if it was because of an update).
It's also really unlikely to break anything you might be doing from one version to the next, unless you're doing really experimental cutting-edge things... And then you probably want the update anyhow.
> What if an update silently breaks the update process? Hrm!
> What if an update silently breaks the update process? Hrm!
Sure, the updater can break itself. But in practice, you rarely update the updater because the majority of the features you might want to update are in the app, not the updater.
So you update the updater very rarely and cautiously, and you update the app quickly and fearlessly. It's not 100% foolproof, but it's a lot better than the alternative: Any crash bug anywhere in the application having the capacity to disable updates.