I am not an expert on this, but I believe Chrome downloads a new exe waiting to be copied over when it is launched. The Firefox updater on the other hand is a whole progress bar experience where a lot of things seem to have to happen to perform an update.
This is correct. Chrome handles updates via a completely separate .exe that runs via the Windows Task Scheduler.
I know this because my company pushed out a Group Policy update a while back that removed the ability of users to add/remove scheduled tasks and it broke Chrome updates across the company.
Also, this problem (not being able to patch a running app) is unique to Windows because of its terrible file locking implementation (that are the result of a bad decision made decades ago!). In Linux you'll get Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox updates along with everything else and it won't disrupt your use in the slightest. You can restart the app to apply those updates at your leisure!
I believe the problem with Edge is (correct me if I'm wrong) that files that would need to be updated are used by Windows Explorer, so any update would need a restart of the machine.
