The hard part here is that, wherever you'd decide to persist a "don't bug me any more about this" flag, malware could also potentially write that same flag to that same place. For example, Windows UAC is frequently set to the "don't bug me about this, just auto-elevate" setting by malware.

> The hard part here is that, wherever you'd decide to persist a "don't bug me any more about this" flag,

Build a new binary - offer users to install a "developer" build of Chrome which is exactly the same as the mainstream "release" build, except it allows disabling the protections.

You don't actually have to go that far; there are plenty of Chrome settings controlled by command-line options, and that's usually safe enough—it's actually really hard for malware to "sneak in" command-line options (if the user is a regular user, while the the Chrome shortcuts in the Start Menu et al were installed under elevation, which is the usual case.) There's a command-line option to Chrome that entirely disables the sandboxing protections, for instance.

My distinction was just that there's absolutely no way to have a UI-based mechanism for disabling nags, since behind any UI is a persisted flag. If you're up for editing your shortcuts to add command-line options, that's fine.

> (if the user is a regular user, while the the Chrome shortcuts in the Start Menu et al were installed under elevation, which is the usual case.)

Nope. Windows allows deletion of "protected" shortcuts e.g. from your desktop and launch bar.

You mean shortcuts placed in the All Users Desktop/QuickLaunch/StartMenu folders? (I'm guessing it's just "hiding" them with a Desktop.ini entry, rather than truly deleting them?)

That's probably fine, actually, as long as the user (i.e. malware) isn't allowed to create their own shortcuts to replace the deleted ones. I assume there's a GPO to disable the per-user Desktop/QuickLaunch/StartMenu folders, so that only the results from the All Users ones show up?

Adding a command line option that allows disabling the nags via a UI would be solution.

So you're saying we should just obey Big Brother Google and not try to do anything it doesn't approve of?

As the old saying goes, "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

At least theoretically, it should be possible to build Chromium with such customizations; you'll lose the benefits of the Google walled garden, but you'll gain a bit of user freedom as well (probably won't be point-and-click, alas).

Sadly Chrome sync is one of the major thing that keeps me on Chrome, it just works and syncs everything.

I wonder if it would be possible to build an open-source Chromium sync plugin? (Self-hosted, ideally). Is anyone already working on this?

Chromium syncs with your Google account, but in my experience is a bit buggier, at least on Linux.