The default, or shall I say more prominent, installer for the Google Chrome web browser offers only single user account installations only. More precisely, it can only be installed for the user account that is currently logged into the operating system. That’s not a problem for single user systems, but if you maintain computers with multiple accounts, you might want to use an installer that will install the web browser for all user accounts at once.

What many users do not know is that Google is offering an alternative installer for Windows administrators who want to install the Chrome web browser for multiple user accounts.

The alternate Google Chrome installer for Windows is available here on this help page at the Google Chrome support website. A click on Alternate installer for all user accounts leads to the multi-user installer for Windows.

The installer is an offline installer, it comes with all program modules and does not need to download additional contents from the Internet during installation.

Google notes:

These alternate installers don’t require network connection to install Chrome, so you can install Chrome while being offline. Once installed, Chrome will attempt to automatically update whenever it detects that a newer version of the browser is available. However, your network configuration may prevent the browser from updating properly. It’s recommended that you bookmark this page and come back periodically to manually download newer versions of Chrome.

It should be obvious that administrator rights are required to run the Google Chrome multi-user installer under Windows. It also needs to be noted that running the installer will replace all other versions of Chrome that may be already installed on the computer.

Users of the system will be notified automatically that the browser has updated to a system-wide version during the next browser start. They may need to recreate profile information, especially so if they have used a more recent build of the browser before.

Administrators need to uninstall a version of Chrome that is already installed in the administrator account before they run the alternate Chrome installer.

© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011.