Correction: Google Chrome uninstalls... eventually.
In my original dissection of Google Chrome's setup I noted that the Google Updater was left running after I uninstalled. After a pretty smooth installation experience, that partial uninstall left a bad impression on me. Well, it turns out that my observation was only half correct.
A comment was left on my blog and a friend of mine at Google noted that the Updater is left behind but does remove itself a number of hours after the uninstall of Chrome.
I missed this fact because after uninstalling Chrome and noting that the Google Updater was still running I immediately went about removing it manually. After hearing that I just had to wait, I again installed then uninstalled Chrome and waited. About eight hours after my uinstall the Updater unregistered itself and shutdown. In the end, I was just left with some user data (good) and a couple directories in the LocalAppDataFolder\Google directory (less than ideal but no big deal).
So Google Chrome does get cleaned up and that makes me feel much better about the install (I’ve posted an update to my original blog post).
Now I’m just puzzling over the decision to not uninstall Google Updater right away. I can’t come up with a good reason for the Google developers to risk upsetting geeks (like me). Geeks are the most likely to adopt the new browser in the first place. But geeks are the most likely to notice the “bad uninstall”. And geeks are also the most likely to get upset by junk left over after uninstall.
Anyone out there want to random a guess why Google chose to have the Updater uninstall behave this way?