What many users do not know is that Google is offering an alternative installer for Windows administrators who want to install the Chrome web browser for multiple user accounts.

The alternate Google Chrome installer for Windows is available here on this help page at the Google Chrome support website. A click on Alternate installer for all user accounts leads to the multi-user installer for Windows.

The installer is an offline installer, it comes with all program modules and does not need to download additional contents from the Internet during installation.

Google notes:

These alternate installers don’t require network connection to install Chrome, so you can install Chrome while being offline. Once installed, Chrome will attempt to automatically update whenever it detects that a newer version of the browser is available. However, your network configuration may prevent the browser from updating properly. It’s recommended that you bookmark this page and come back periodically to manually download newer versions of Chrome.

It should be obvious that administrator rights are required to run the Google Chrome multi-user installer under Windows. It also needs to be noted that running the installer will replace all other versions of Chrome that may be already installed on the computer.

Users of the system will be notified automatically that the browser has updated to a system-wide version during the next browser start. They may need to recreate profile information, especially so if they have used a more recent build of the browser before.

Administrators need to uninstall a version of Chrome that is already installed in the administrator account before they run the alternate Chrome installer.

There are probably additional reasons for a Google Chrome offline installer. There is however an easy – but somewhat hidden – option for users who want to download an offline installer for Google Chrome.

All that these users need to do is to append the parameter standalone=1 to the website where Google Chrome can be downloaded. Here are the two download links for the latest official and latest beta version of the Google browser:

Latest official: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?standalone=1
Latest beta: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=betachannel&standalone=1

This will download the full installer of the selected Google Chrome browser to the local computer system. It is then possible to install Google Chrome without Internet connection by simply distributing the offline installer to the computer system where it should be installed.

The Google Chrome developers mentioned that it might not be possible to auto-update these versions of the Google Chrome browser. The auto update service should however be active when downloading the offline installers. They should work normally if an Internet connection is present to check for updates.