I see it all the time: Winget tells me there’s an update for Chrome availalbe. You can see that too, in the lead-in screencap. It shows that the target PC needs an update to version 128.0.6613.114. A quick peek into Chrome > Help > About shows it’s on …113 right now. On one PC, the winget command showed success but a dive into Chrome ran the update anyway. On the test PC from which the screencap came (includes the post-upgrade About Chrome info at right), I conducted an experiment. It produced a clean Chrome Winget update. Let me explain how that happened…

Ensuring a Clean Chrome Winget Update

For a long time, I’ve wondered if an active Chrome process running might stymie Winget’s updates for that browser. I think I’ve pretty much now proved that to myself. On a PC with one or more active Chrome processes running — and BTW, some persist even if you close Chrome after it’s been opened — the small Chrome updater window may or may not appear. If it doesn’t show up, the upgrade doesn’t happen. If it does show up, you may still have to visit Help > About to hit the “Relaunch” button to finish that job.

But if there are NO (zero) Chrome processes running on the PC when Winget tries to update that program, everything completes properly. It’s always been Winget’s practice to err on the side of caution and prevent updates from possibly affecting, damaging or losing user data inside a running app or application. I’m pretty sure that’s what drives this behavior here.

Reboot Before Winget Upgrade?

I’m tempted to recommend rebooting a PC before running  winget upgrade. But because plenty of apps and applications can (and sometimes do) run as startup tasks, this might not result in a pristine runtime that will ensure everything updates “just so.”

About the best one can do — including your humble author — is to close open processes related to targeted winget updates before turning its upgrade functions loose. And boy howdy, isn’t some kind of caveat like this the hallmark of a real-live Windows-World adventure? Hint: rhetorical question…