So after uninstalling a former version of the Google Chrome browser, I downloaded the full offline installer of Chrome and tried to install. I have done it many times before successfully, but this time it was different. This time the installation failed and the Chrome installer popped up an error message saying “Installed failed. The Google Chrome installer failed to start”. This is something I had not encountered before and after a quick hand at googling about the problem, I realized that not many other people have faced this problem before either. After numerous attempts to install the Google Chrome browser and removal of the remnants left on my Windows PC, I was finally successful.
If you are also facing the “Chrome installed has failed to start” error, then you can follow these steps to clean the remnants of old version of Chrome left behind before installing the new version in your PC:
- Press the Win+R key combination on your keyboard to open the Run dialog, type in regedit and press Enter. This will open the Windows Registry Editor.
- In the Registry Editor, locate the following keys related to Google, right-click on them and select Delete.
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Google
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google
Some of these keys may not exist in your Windows PC, but you have to delete any of these keys you can find.
- Press the Win+R key combination on your keyboard to open the Run dialog, type in %LocalAppData% and press Enter. This will open the local App Data folder in the Windows File Explorer.
- Locate the Google sub-folder inside the local app data folder and delete it.
- That’s it. Now you can try installing Google Chrome browser once again and it should install without any problems.
Conclusion: Google Chrome may fail to install if the remnants of a previous version are still present on your PC. You can remove these remnants from your Windows PC and install the new version successfully.