This isn't possible today for a number of reasons: * From Omaha's perspective, Chrome has a single unique app id, regardless of channel. This allows you to seamlessly migrate from one channel to the next. * Chrome's installer only has one location to install into, so even if you could get two channels installing, they would clobber each other. * Chrome has a default profile location, so even if you could get two versions installed and updating independently, you'd have to launch one with a command-line flag to use a different user data dir.
I don't know if anybody has tried this, but while writing this it occurred to me that there may be a workaround for the first two issues. What you would do is install one channel as a per-machine installation (Program Files) and the other as a per-user install (%USERPROFILE%). This would theoretically work around the Omaha issue. However, I would bet that the installer wouldn't know which directory it's supposed to go to, so probably one of the directories would win and it would wind up overinstalling into the same directory (so only the latest channel would likely win). Maybe if Omaha passed the info of machine-vs-user install into the installer it would be possible for it to distinguish which instance it was supposed to be updating. For a more generalized solution to this (providing a way for Omaha to manage multiple tracks of the same app id in parallel), maybe file an Omaha bug ( http://code.google.com/p/omaha/issues/list). Erik p.s. I know Aaron knows about this, so it wasn't the point of his original question, but for anybody else, the other workaround is to use one of the third-party chromium updaters in parallel with a chrome installation. Chromium has its own separate profile dir, intall location, etc. On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Aaron Boodman <a...@google.com> wrote: > On Windows, is there a way to hack the registry to allow multiple > channels of Chrome to be installed simultaneously and let them update? > It would be really useful for testing. > > - a > > -- > Chromium Developers mailing list: chromium-dev@googlegroups.com > View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: > http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev > -- Chromium Developers mailing list: chromium-dev@googlegroups.com View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev
