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I created a chrome extension and I released an update few days ago. As far as I know, when the user re-opening the browser or restarting his pc, chrome should auto update the extensions automatically. However, I noticed that for some of my users, even when they restarted their pc, they still on an old version of the extension and it won't auto update.

The current newest version is 1.3.2. I uploaded it few days ago. Some of the users are still on version 1.3.1 even though they restarted their pc.

Why does it happen? As far as I know there is no option to disable auto-update of extensions..

UPDATE:

Chromium bug reported (Edit suggestions are welcomed): https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=537646&thanks=537646&ts=1443630404

morha13
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    I have noticed this same thing.You have to manually update them by clicking update extensions in chrome://extensions page – Siddharth Sep 27 '15 at 07:48
  • @Sid Yeah I know how to do that, The problem is that I don't want my users to do that. Is it a possible bug in google chrome? Should I report to chrumium? – morha13 Sep 27 '15 at 07:54
  • This just came into my mind - Make sure that your users are running latest version of chrome. This might be a problem related with older versions of chrome. – Siddharth Sep 27 '15 at 08:00
  • @Sid I will check that. But yet, I don't think it's the cause because I'm pretty sure that the auto-update option exist since the extensions exist. – morha13 Sep 27 '15 at 08:05
  • @Sid I will have results in about a week, that's when I get enough data from different users. – morha13 Sep 27 '15 at 08:18
  • @Sid Ok I have a data of one user already. At the 22nd (6 days ago) he downloaded my extension. The extension version was 1.2.9. Since then I released few updates. Now I'm at version 1.3.4 (Yes I had many updates because I tried to debug this auto-update problem). Already at the 23nd I released an update 1.3.0. Since the 22nd, this same user re-opened his browser 11 times, but for some reason he didn't update to version 1.3.0 or any new other version that I uploaded. He opened the browser every day in the past 6 days, so he should have updated already. – morha13 Sep 28 '15 at 13:30
  • @Sid His browser data: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.101 Safari/537.36 – morha13 Sep 28 '15 at 13:30
  • Well according to the code here : https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/extensions/common/constants.cc&sq=package:chromium&type=cs&l=46&rcl=1412363029 It checks every 5 hours if new extension version is available at CWS. But users have experienced that even after restarting OS extension didn't update. So this might be some bug in Chrome. – Siddharth Sep 28 '15 at 15:11
  • @Sid Yep I saw that. I think it's a bug. I will make a report later today and I will post it here. – morha13 Sep 28 '15 at 17:57
  • @Sid Edit suggestions are welcomed: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=537646&thanks=537646&ts=1443630404 – morha13 Sep 30 '15 at 16:34

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You don't explicitly say this anywhere, so I'm going to assume your extension doesn't check for updates? I've never had this issue personally but I also have my extensions listen for updates at runtime using chrome.runtime.onUpdateAvailable and request a check using chrome.runtime.requestUpdateCheck. This should solve your auto-update issue. Also, here's a great answer to a similar problem: How to cause a chrome app to update as soon as possible?

nburr
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  • I read that, but shouldn't chrome auto update the extension anyways? But I will try using it later too – morha13 Oct 01 '15 at 18:45
  • Yes, it should. But like most things, it isn't always consistent and, depending on the extension, can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days to update (sometimes longer). That's why having the manual check built into the extension helps ensure it'll update quickly and more consistently. – nburr Oct 01 '15 at 19:51
  • I'm adding this function in my next release. I will know if it works in few days. I will let you know if it helped asap. Thank you! – morha13 Oct 01 '15 at 22:30
  • Sorry for the delay.. I will know if it works in the next few hours, when I will have data from most of my users – morha13 Oct 04 '15 at 13:00
  • Awesome, glad to hear it! – nburr Oct 05 '15 at 20:53