Chrome Managed Browsers

[t_jones]

Managing Chrome Browsers on Macs. 
We push out a Config Profile to our macs which enrolls the Chrome browsers using a token taken from our Google Admin console. This works for most things (limiting the users who can sign in, allowing/disallowing extensions, etc). 

What we want to happen, is to force the updates of the Chrome Browser based on the settings in the google Admin console. For example, Chrome 93 is available, but we havent updated beyond Chrome 91. We have it set in  Google Admin to only update to 91. This works for Chromebooks and Windows managed Chrome Browsers. When we change that chrome version from 91 to 92, all chromebooks and Windows managed chrome browsers will update to 92. This doesnt work on the macs. We have to push a separate package to update chrome on the macs. I found this
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7591084?hl=en#zippy=%2Ccreate-a-new-property-list-file%2C...
But it only talks about turning auto update on/off.  We dont want the browsers to auto update to the newest version because it has previously broken some of our required sites (Seesaw...) We want it to auto update to the highest allowable based off what we have in the Google Admin Console, like the Chromebooks and Windows Managed Browsers do. 

Just curious if anyone has a plist for a chrome managed browser on macs that will set them to update to the version allowed in the google admin console? Or anyone have this working? 

Im attaching screenshots of the config profile and our browser settings in Google. 

  

[sdagley]

@t_jones How are you installing Chrome? Is it via the .pkg that Google makes available to Mac admins that automatically enables the Keystone update mechanism? Or do you take the Google Chrome.app from the disk image Google distributes and build a .pkg from that? If the latter then there is no update mechanism enabled that will update the .app when you change the settings in the Google Admin console.

[t_jones]

We install the Chrome enterprise... 

https://chromeenterprise.google/browser/download/#mac-tab

[sdagley]

@t_jones Well so much for that theory. 🙂

It won't address your goal of managing versions via the Google Admin console, but you could try pushing a Configuration Profile with an Application & Custom Settings payload for the com.google.Keystone Preference Domain with an updatePolicies key for com.google.chrome

[t_jones]

That may be what I end up doing... 
Its just so easy to control it all in the google Admin console and it manages the chromebookes and managed chrome browsers on the windows devices. wish it would on the macs too

[edward_stewart]

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9844476?hl=en