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Comment by padmanabhan01 | Hacker News Reader

Main reason: Too frequent updates with little noticeable improvement is a hassle.

The frequent updates are security patches. You want them to be frequent and not to change things beyond the security issue.

There is a definite case for those to be a silent install though.

Security is overrated.

I was surprised to find disdain for Chrome's silent updates in the comments of the article. The fact that Chrome silently handles such security updates and never nags me about them was one of the (lesser) reasons I switched away from Firefox--even though Firefox's minor updates are fairly quick and relatively painless, I still found myself annoyed when it kept asking me to install them.

As long as there's no user-visible changes and it just silently fixes some internal bug, I'm okay with that. I'd be annoyed if anything user-visible changed without Chrome telling me it was upgrading, though.

(And the real push-back will probably come if a silent update accidentally breaks things, so I guess there's extra incentive to make sure that doesn't happen.)

The disdain is from the nerds. Regular users will never complain about that.

I love the idea of automatic background updates, but I would prefer to know when they've happened. At least pop up a message the next time I restart the browser. (Steam's update model is fantastic.)

The thing I hate about silent updates is that if they cause something to break, I have no indication that a browser update is a possible culprit. If I am informed of an update and then find that something has stopped working, I at least have a starting point for resolving the issue.

Mandatory silent updates are great for security and stability fixes; the complaints people have about it are when the web browser changes the UI or breaks compatibility with extensions. Maybe a hybrid approach would be best.

Hear, hear.

Main reason I don't like using Firefox: It runs an update every friggen time I start it.

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