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Comment by iaskwhy | Hacker News Reader

I find it odd I had to restart after upgrading a browser in OSX, reminds me of that old time. In Windows the upgrade went without a restart.

Edit: Yes, talking about Safari only.

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In what Windows did the upgrading go without a restart? Firefox, maybe. But upgrading the MS COM component responsible for drawing shadows on a drop down menu in some obscure MS library for accessing DAO databases ALWAYS requires a restart.

I uninstalled ZoneAlarm a few days ago and clicked "OK" as I went through the motions .. great, now the machine is rebooting and I lost whatever the fuck I was doing.

Compare that to Linux where I was developing custom file system drivers. modprobe foo, and I had a foo driver looking at an intricate piece of chipod, rmmod and it's gone ..

Wax poetic all you want about OS stability, but Windows is the wrong muse to sing to wrt stability, and I say that typing on XP.

I assume the comment referred to Safari 5 for Windows.

The original comment was referring to Safari 5 on Mac. Safari 5 on windows does not require a restart.

I can't edit my first comment again but I was talking about updating Safari in both operating systems. In OSX you are required to restart, in Windows you don't need to.

Upgraded Safari on an XP machine this morning, from 4 to 5, and no restart was required. Also noticed that Apple have made the 'Install iTunes and friends' option opt-in now, which is nice

You are not only upgrading Safari. You are upgrading Webkit as well! And it is used in many other apps, like iTunes. Webkit is very much integrated into OS X. That's why it needs to restart.

It shouldn't be very to hard to generate a list of running apps that link against the updated libs and ask the user for permission to restart them... Or let the user ignore it at own peril.

Almost everything is (potentially) linked against WebKit (At least judging by how broken my system when a rogue rogue flash plugin broke webkit.). Certainly Finder, for example. It could just get away with enforcing log off/log on again, but if multiple users are logged in it is probably simpler just to restart. "Ignoring at their own peril" will almost certainly result in horrible crashes.

Ah, that brings back nice memories of IE and Windows.

Sparkle (the update framework) uses WebKit, so everything that uses Sparkle links against it.

Why would there be crashes? The running apps will keep their already loaded binary until they're restarted.

Maybe there'll be some bugs in handling shared on-disk resources (cache, and maybe something else?), but I doubt that those parts change very often. That would be a reasonable reason to require a reboot, but unless those parts actually change it should be avoided.

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