From reading Chrome is Bad, it seems in some situations the updater (also known as keystone) can chew up CPU cycles. Whilst I’m not 100% convinced keystone continuously chews CPU, its launchctl configuration suggests it runs at least once an hour. Given I don’t use Chrome as my main browser, this is undesirable behaviour for me.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to disable the background services rather than delete Chrome entirely. (I need it occasionally.) Stopping/unloading the services and fettling the config files to do nothing achieves this aim (and stops Chrome re-enabling them next launch), whilst leaving Chrome fully functional when needed.

0. Unload the currently loaded services

   launchctl unload -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.xpcservice.plist
   launchctl unload -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist
   

1. Empty the config files, so if launchd ever tries to launch them they’ll just error out

   echo > ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.xpcservice.plist
   echo > ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist
   

2. Change ownership and permissions of these files so only root can write to the files

   chmod 644 ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.xpcservice.plist
   chmod 644 ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist
   sudo chown root ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.xpcservice.plist
   sudo chown root ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist
   

Now when I want to update Chrome once in a blue moon when I need it, I can navigate to chrome://settings/help to update (or from the UI, Chrome -> About Chrome.)