Mozilla plans to silently update Firefox

Good for Mozilla, I hope this doesn't get dropped from 4.0 due to deadlines or other reasons. Making it easy and fuss free for users to get security updates for your product may not be a sexy feature but it is a great one.<p>The reason Safari is the browser that takes the longest for users to apply security updates is because at least on the Mac, most (all?) require a reboot. I still have't updated to 5.01 because of this. Not good. Not good at all.

This is excellent, assuming it works like Chrome.<p>The updates are silently downloaded in the background, and applied the next time you restart the browser.<p>This behavior can be disabled fully. It doesn't interrupt your work at all, never even alerting you that there is a new version it's downloading or a new version that's running.<p>This is primarily for security updates where you shouldn't have an option to browse un-patched for months on end.

One of the main reasons I stopped using FireFox as my daily browser is that it forces me to care about updates.<p>I open FF to browse the web, and it tells me no, wait while I download and install some updates. Ok, now wait while I show you a screen telling you about those updates. If you want, you can close it and these other 5 tabs I opened, and then you can go browse the web. Total elapsed time: 1-3 minutes, all of which are spent actively hating FireFox.<p>Compare that to the Chrome experience: click the icon, 3 seconds later it opens up ready to go, every single time. Maybe once in a while something is new, but I never need to care. Perfect.

How will this work for Windows 7? Most user accounts will not have write access to the Firefox folder. Will the updater use the system account?

The future tense in this article seems a bit strange—Firefox has offered behaviour something like this for quite a while. It wasn't completely silent, in the sense that it advertised once it had completed the update; maybe that's what's being changed? (It is also customisable, and I have it at what I think is a convenient level: It notifies me when an update's available (so that I don't forget that I'm running an old version), but leaves it to me to do something about it (so that I don't run into the troubles viraptor mentions (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586112" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586112</a>).)<p>On the other hand, maybe my perspective on <i>Was sind und was sollen Firefox</i> is skewed, because I always try to run the most up-to-date version (including betas); I can't remember if I started seeing this behaviour in the 3.x branch.

I say, great solution Mozilla!<p>Advanced users can toggle it on/off. Mortal users won't know it's there.<p>Mortal users are the ones that regularly are better off not knowing. I on the other hand, prefer to see exactly who's updating and what for, and It's good to know that I have a choice.<p>Giving user choice = good :)

There are 3 big reasons to not enable it. They depend on how you use internet of course, but I'd never use full-automatic mode:<p>- Mozilla doesn't know what kind of link I'm using. I may be in another country on a pay-per-MB 3G, which they will not pay for. Updating a browser can actually create a really large bill, while all you want to do is open your email.<p>- Mozilla doesn't know what am I doing with my link right now. Maybe I'm almost saturating it right now with a Video call? I don't want them to start a not requested &#62;100kB/s transfer in the middle of my call.<p>- Mozilla doesn't know how secure my environment is. I may be on a shared network on a security conference. Yeah... all kinds of things can happen there. That's why I'm not going to login anywhere from such place and will definitely not update my system.

I really wish they would have a better solution then Chrome. Chrome is fine for a single person, but for installing on a couple of hundred machines, the "silent" update is not silent to the network admin or anyone in a distance learning classroom.<p>I would really like vendors to allow updates from a local web server. That way I download the update myself and have it only eating local network traffic.<p>Also, educational vendors are notorious about having software break with updates. I really hope I can turn this off in labs where students need to take certification tests.<p>Like others I am super worried about Adobe updating. Not only from a compatibility problem or network traffic problem, but their installer on the Mac is horrible and I really wonder will my non-admin account students have problems.

I think this is a great trend for usability and security. For software companies that can actually do it well.<p>But at the bottom of the article it mentions that Adobe are experimenting with doing it. Argh!<p>Flash yes, I can see it. But Reader? I don't want it to update on the rare occasions I open a pdf.<p>Actually the only reason I oppose Adobe doing it is because I think of them as having some pretty awful programming teams. And whoever writes their updaters is one of those bloody awful teams.<p>Certain parts of their products are very buggy compared to Google, MS or games programmers. They just do not have quality across their brand.<p>My constant nightmares with adobe updaters across a wide variety of machines has made me believe this.<p>When it comes to updaters Adobe have always chosen the worst paths, annoying prompts when you hadn't used readers for weeks, horrible confusing UIs and obviously not thoroughly tested.<p>They're just not up to the task.<p>I guess what I'm saying is this trend should be welcomed, but with a pinch of salt, some companies like Google and MS I trust to do it. Others I would not (Adobe if you hadn't guessed ;).

This is only useful if they don't break extensions on update. Too many firefox extensions don't survive an update. I'm happy for security fixes to get pushed out this way but normal bugfix / feature enhancement releases less so.

So how does this work, I'm doing something in my browser and it spontaneously restarts, losing whatever I'm filling into a form?<p>I have noticed with Firefox 3 if I ignore its updates for too long it goes to 100% CPU and stays there until I kill it in Task Manager, then on restart it installs its updates. This never happens unless there's an unapplied update waiting...