Auto-update aside, you might also have found it hard to find a Chrome binary with a specific version. Google intentionally doesn’t make versioned Chrome downloads available, since users shouldn’t have to care about version numbers—they should always get updated to the latest version as soon as possible. This is great for users, but painful for developers needing to reproduce a bug report in an older Chrome version.

Now that Rails has a dependency on Webpack, it then has a dependency on Node.js and Yarn, surprise! Which means we also need to ensure the versions used for those binaries are specific.