A friend posted this on FaceBook:



What he found was that Chrome installs a daemon that runs, regardless of whether Chrome is active or not, to check on update status. If there is no internet connection, it seemingly “screams” as he puts is and runs the battery down. Even if you uninstall Chrome, this daemon remains (and persists through restarts too). He had to manually seek it out and delete it.

Interesting. I've been sceptical about Chrome since it's release - worlds biggest advertising company releases a browser and you trust it?

Any idea what the daemon is called? I've done a search in Activity Monitor for "google" and "chrome" but nothing's turned up.

It might be something called "keystone". However it is not running on my system. I'm at work so can only access the command line on my home Mac.
However, it appears to be in this list of all jobs loaded in to launchd:


When I get home I'll endeavour to try restarting my Mac without the network enabled and see if it runs continuously...

I’ll ask him.

Got a reply. He says it's called something like "Google Software Update".

The files will be found here
~/Library/LaunchAgents/

The are some Google plist files the one called Keystone is the problem one.

You need to remove the launch agent and reboot. This will remove Chrome's ability to update automatically if you want to keep the browser. You'll have to update manually.

Cheers, found it!
Tempted to uninstall Chrome, I only use it for testing purposes anyway.

Oddly, I found the files on my MBP. The daemon isn't running on mine. It's rating worth checking as this can affect performance if it is running all the time.