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Comment by philg_jr | Hacker News Reader

Couple things.

1. Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app? I dunno, I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update. 2. Firefox has a pretty reliable "Restore Previous Session" feature that works well. I have also been known to throw a SIGTERM at Firefox and just let it prompt me when I start it again for the "Something went wrong, should we restore your session?". Seems to always work for me.

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>Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app?

Updates are automatic every day.

>I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update

How often does that happen? It doesn't seem reasonable to put off security updates that have already been fixed and are simply waiting to install.

Firefox is the only program I've run into where automatic updates have led to a negative experience. Every single other program handles them just fine.

The reason it’s different is that it (like Chromium) runs a multi-process sandbox to try to isolate your system from vulnerabilities in the JS runtime or renderer. It’s possible to handle updates while new tabs are created gracefully in that case, but far from trivial.

Some people prefer automatic updates. It didn't used to criple the running browser process after an update, that change is very recent.

Restore session doesn't help if you're in a private session.

Also you may be in the middle of actually using your browser for thing that you don't want to interrupt, a game, an online application, anything really..

It's only in parts recent. Updating Firefox did not have this enforcing message telling you to restart, but before Firefox would just randomly break when updated via the package manager. Preventing that is better now.

Don't do automatic updates if you do not want automatic updates. Automatic updates just absolutely can cause you to have to restart stuff, depending on what got updated exactly.

> I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system

I haven't rebooted my system in days, and I make updates twice a day...

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