Configuring Google Chrome on a Terminal Server

In this post, which is a follow-up to this post, https://peppercrew.nl/how-to-install-google-chrome-on-a-terminal-server/, I will describe how you can configure Google Chrome on a Terminal Server.

After installing Google Chrome on a Terminal Server you want to configure Google Chrome with group policy’s. I used the policy from this site: The Chromium Projects.

In this policy you want to configure a path where the user data and browser cache are stored. By default the Google Chrome user data is stored under the folder Local Settings, the part of the user profile that does not roam at logoff. If you don’t enter a different path here the user changes in Google Chrome are not saved at logoff. At first I entered the path to the user terminal server home directory (\\server\TSProfiles\%username%\Chrome\User Data).

You don’t want to store the browser cache within the users terminal server profile, this will cause the profile to grow over time. The browser cache is best saved under the users terminal server home directory. I configured some changes within Google Chrome and I logged off. When I checked the users terminal server profile I see that there are no changes saved. In both configured folders.

After al lot of searching I found an article that described that Google Chrome does not use the ‘standard’ Windows variables but it used it’s own variables. 

The path for the user terminal server profile path should be: ${roaming_app_data}\Google\Chrome\User Data.

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And the path for the home directory should be: ${local_app_data}\Google\Chrome

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After this change the user settings are saved and are roaming with the user.

After some time I received the following error from an user; Error stated that the user setting could not be loaded, or there is an new version of Google Chrome. The user can browse, but the user settings are not loaded or saved. The error is that the user data is corrupted. Our user data is stored under the users terminal server profile. In the folder User Data you will find a folder called Default. If you receive this folder you can rename the folder Default to default_backup. If you now start Google Chrome the folder Default is automatically created.

P.s. In the above post I used redirected folders, this is due to the fact that customer did not have budget to use a third party product to solve this issue.