I am confused by a recent Chrome update. Chrome warned me that it could not update itself and said I should do it manually. So I thought I should do what it said and update Chrome.. so I clicked the link in the Chrome browser to get to the Chrome download page and got the .deb package. Everything looked fine until I did a command line install when I saw it.
user@debian-linux-pc:~$ sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
[sudo] password for user:
dpkg: warning: downgrading google-chrome-stable from 91.0.4472.101-1 to 86.0.4240.75-1
so it looks like I am now installing an older version of Chrome, which just is wrong. So what happened.
So I have Firefox as well, so I didn't want to open the older version of Chrome, so I opened Firefox and used it to get the latest chrome.deb file… so when I downloaded I saw that
ls -lt *.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 82931984 Sep 2 23:32 google-chrome-stable_current_amd64(1).deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 71150488 Oct 5 2020 google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
so the new version is from today and the previous version I downloaded is nearly a year old…
so I then deleted the old version and mved the new .deb file to google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb and reinstalled from the latest version and got
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
(Reading database ... 285742 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking google-chrome-stable (93.0.4577.63-1) over (86.0.4240.75-1) ...
Setting up google-chrome-stable (93.0.4577.63-1) ...
so all looks good now and I go into Chrome, check the history, and try to find if it is a spoofed site that gave the older version when I downloaded with Chrome and I can only see websites that end in google.com
Does anyone know what is happening? Does this make sense? Should I be worried? It just feels like either (1) Chrome was pointing to the wrong place to update or (2) something malicious was trying to make me install an old (unsecured) version of chrome.
Any suggestions?
Best Answer
I downloaded the new version with chrome and it went into a different directory than the one I expected because of Firefox and Chrome download to different directories.
So I had just downloaded from Chrome but found a version that I had downloaded a year ago with firefox because I was looking in the wrong directory. I then downloaded the new version with firefox which got the (1) extension but was the correct current version.
I then found the correct current version had indeed been downloaded the first time with Chrome, just ended up in a different directory (or a different folder).