Sequencing Google Chrome with App-V 4.5
I’m back after following my App-V 4.5 course @ Login Consultants last week.
The course delivered as promised and I met some very nice and knowledgeable people.
During the course we started talking about Google Chrome and the fact if it would be possible to sequence this application. Well let’s find out…
I first downloaded the Google Chrome offline-installer and then went to work in the 4.5 Sequencer. The installation went smoothly (mostly because you can’t configure anything!) but when I started Chrome in the monitoring phase I was warmly welcomed with this page: 
This was not what I expected because the Google default page looks quite different. Every page I tried to surf gave me the exact same page.
You can solve this issue by starting the executable with the parameter: chrome.exe –no-sandbox (thanks to Google-Chrome- blogo-sphere, check here for a big list of command line switches for Chrome).
Okay, at least it’s starting but when you close and save the sequence now you’ll end up with a package that doesn’t contain anything because the sequencer did not catch the installation.
I started by looking where the application installed itself which is:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\
I mean, come on…what kind of location is that?
Well a crappy one because the App-V 4.5 sequencer by default does not "monitor" that location.
This can also be solved in (at least) 2 ways:
1) Leave the 4.5 sequencer as is and copy the installed application from Application Data to a folder underneath your Q: mount point. (for example Q:\Chrome.000\Google\*.*) during the monitoring phase of course.
Then create a shortcut in Q:\Chrome.000\Shortcut pointing to the executable on the Q drive.
2) Or edit the 4.5 Sequencer exclusion items so that it looks at the application data folder and catches the installation during monitoring phase.
I also tried installing Google Chrome with a 3.2.x Sequencer and with that version the installation works out of the box (probably because of the missing exclusion items)
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TAGS: Howto, sequence, Google Chrome, Softgrid App-v 4.5