Overview

Google Chrome is fast becoming popular in the enterprise and Google has provided some tools to make deployment and management easier for Windows admins:

• Google Chrome for Business site: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/chromebrowser.html
• Google Chrome MSI (for deployment via GPO): http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/business/download.html
• Google Chrome Group Policy template files: http://dl.google.com/dl/edgedl/chrome/policy/policy_templates.zip

Issue

By default, Google Chrome keeps user settings in the following locations:

Windows XP/2003:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

Windows Vista/2008 & 7/2008 R2:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

Unfortunately, due to the fact that Google Chrome keeps user settings in the local application data section of the user profile, it cannot be used with roaming profiles out of the box. For some enterprises, this may be a major road block in deploying Chrome!

Google’s Group Policy templates allow for setting the UserDataDir to another location however unfortunately, if an environmental variable (such as %APPDATA%) is used within the UserDataDir path (ie %APPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data), Chrome crashes on startup. It appears that Chrome does not support the use of environmental variables for passing paths via GPO.

Solution

Google seem to have created their own variables rather than using the standard Windows environmental variables.

The current list of Chrome variables on Windows includes:

• %APPDATA% = ${roaming_app_data}
• %LOCALAPPDATA% = ${local_app_data}
• %USERNAME% =  ${user_name}
• %COMPUTERNAME% = ${machine_name}
• %USERPROFILE% = ${profile}
• %PROGRAMFILES% =  ${program_files}
• %WINDIR% =  ${windows}

Other variables:

• ${documents} – The “Documents” folder for the current user. (“C:\Users\Administrator\Documents”)
• ${global_app_data} – The system-wide Application Data folder. (“C:\AppData”)

So for example, to store Chrome’s user data in the roaming application data section of users profiles, I set the UserDataDir policy path to:

${roaming_app_data}\Google\Chrome\User Data