The Silent Upgrades
Google Chrome is designed to be highly secure, and to achieve this, it relies on a silent, aggressive background updater. On macOS, Chrome utilizes a background daemon (often called Keystone) that periodically checks Google’s servers for new versions. When an update is found, Chrome automatically downloads it and prepares to install it the next time you close the browser. While this ensures you always have the latest security patches, it can completely break your workflow if an update introduces a catastrophic bug, alters a UI element you rely on, or breaks compatibility with a critical, legacy extension.
Halting the Update Daemon
To lock in your current browser version and stop Google Chrome from automatically updating on a Mac, you must disable the background update agent via the terminal.
Because Chrome considers automatic updates a critical security feature, there is no simple toggle switch in the settings menu. You must block the updater at the system level. Close Google Chrome completely (Command+Q). Open the Terminal app (found in Applications > Utilities). You need to change the update interval to a value that effectively disables it. Type the following command exactly: defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0 and press Enter. This instructs the Keystone agent to wait zero seconds (meaning never) before checking for updates again. To re-enable updates in the future, run the same command but change the “0” back to “18000” (the default 5-hour interval).