I was surprised to see that Google's automatic-update system for Linux is to just hook into the native packaging system (for Ubuntu/Debian this is APT, it sounds like they're planning Yum integration for Fedora, etc.)
I'm not sure whether to be annoyed that their installer messes with my system configuration, or to applaud them for not re-inventing the auto-update wheel yet again.
I suppose the advantage of Firefox's update mechanism is that the browser can present nice 'please shutdown now' dialogs; on the other hand, Ubuntu already refuses to upgrade Firefox while there's a firefox process running, so maybe this is a net win after all.
Chrome should soon be able to update without going horribly wrong. (This is more difficult than you probably suspect since we exec new processes for new tabs much of the time).
We certainly don't want to reinvent auto-updating when we don't need to. Sticking a new apt source into your system config is a /little/ freakly, but not nearly as bad as assuming that user processes are going to update system binaries.
It adds an Apt repository to your system in order to keep Chrome up to date, and adds a launcher to /usr/share/applications. Those are the only modifications; even Chrome itself is self-contained within /opt/google.
I'm not sure whether to be annoyed that their installer messes with my system configuration, or to applaud them for not re-inventing the auto-update wheel yet again.
I suppose the advantage of Firefox's update mechanism is that the browser can present nice 'please shutdown now' dialogs; on the other hand, Ubuntu already refuses to upgrade Firefox while there's a firefox process running, so maybe this is a net win after all.