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Comment by andrewheins | Hacker News Reader

This is a confusing feeling. The Firefox release mechanism makes this more frustrating than friendly.

With Chrome, my browser automatically updates for stuff like this. I never see it and always have the correct version.

For Firefox, I have to purposefully seek out the next version, and considering I'm still upgrading some of my machines to 4.0 from 3.5 (I downloaded 4.0 yesterday on one machine), this is kind of annoying.

I'm not sure a quick release schedule works quite as well if you've got to manually upgrade. I like Chrome for the same reason I sign up for automatic bill payments - I understand it's important, but I don't want to have to deal with it.

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Firefox does automatically download the next version in the background. It prompts you to restart a while after the update is downloaded, but we're working on making the prompting less intrusive than it's been in the past. Also, I think you get a more intrusive prompt if the update will disable any extensions.

See this article for some of the work we're doing to make add-on compatibility work seamlessly in new versions:

http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibili...

Where does it get the download? I seem to be one of the few left who likes to upgrade manually—I like to give others some time to shake out the bugs first—and so I use Firefox's notifications as a reminder to go and download the file myself.

I'm running 5.0b7, and have been receiving notifications for a while (maybe 3 days?) that there was an update available; but http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel and https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html didn't have any upgrade available until today. Is there somewhere else to look, or were my upgrade notifications erroneous?

Help -> About lets you know if there is an update and has an apply update button to start it whenever you like.

Thanks, but (while that's a sensible answer to the question) it's not quite what I wanted. I would like to be able to download the new version myself. Is it really true that, up until today, it was possible to update from 5.0b7 to 5.0 within the browser itself, but impossible to download 5.0 directly? If not (i.e., if it is possible to download 5.0 directly), then I must have been looking in the wrong places; where should I look?

I'm pretty sure there were no releases between 5.0b7 and 5.0 final, so I'm not sure why Firefox was prompting you to update. But in any case, you can download any release manually from ftp://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

Thanks!

> always have the correct version.

Depends what you mean by "correct version". If your app isn't tested with 5, then it's not the correct version.

Firefox's release mechanism is the middle ground between IE's and Chrome's: you get updates, but you decide when, and they're not tied to the OS.

In some ways, Chrome has reset the bar for updates. Google has shown that you can have silent background updates containing meaningful features that don't (in general) break add-on compatibility.

People may have felt deterred by this in the past, but I would argue that it has worked impressively well for Chrome so far, and makes older mechanisms seem clumsy and antiquated.

I never changed any default settings, and still got a dialog box asking if I wanted to upgrade. And I'm glad I got that question instead of a forced upgrade, because some of my installed extensions weren't ready for FF5.

How times have changed. Not too long ago people loathed automatic updates and some said they're boycotting Firefox for having an autoupdate feature.

Many still do. I've been using SRWare Iron and as my primary browser - it's Chromium with the privacy-compromising features removed - in part because I'm very uneasy about software being modified by stealth on my system.

In this era when the unfortunate trend in UI design is to make interfaces easier by making them less functional and less customizable, I also especially want a good look at redesigned major-version updates before I install them

I think there are just more users these days that are more vocal about wanting stuff done in the background. I'm in your camp, though -- I don't want stuff happening behind the curtain. At best, I would like an option to turn that off. I imagine a lot of web devs would be upset if their browser suddenly updated to the latest version without keeping the old one somewhere...

This is 100% true:

I switched on our super-workstation at the office a couple of days ago for the first time in a couple of weeks. It's a bit of a hungry beast, so only usually switched on when we need the power.

It took more than two hours of me sitting at the workstation to apply all the updates. I had to manually approve more than a dozen different installations, one after another. We used multiple gigabytes of our monthly bandwidth allowance just to download the patches.

This is a recently set up machine, just a couple of months old. Only a carefully chosen set of software is installed, all of it for professional use. Commercial software is all legal. Open source stuff is all recommended versions from master sources/repositories.

I don't like the idea of auto-updates either, certainly not for things that make any sort of functional change. But I have to wonder, if this is the best the modern software world can offer to people who have real work to do, whether auto-updates for security patches and genuine bug fixes aren't worth it.

I also have to wonder whether the world is really a better place now that on-line patching is routinely available. Software companies used to have to get something into a fit state to sell before they started selling it, because patching something afterwards was prohibitively expensive and shipping a product with serious flaws would get you a bad reputation and cost a lot of money.

What an odd story.

Where is it that you live that is so resource constrained, in both bandwidth and electricity? And why are you trying to run a business there?

Also it's fair to say that whatever you've saved in electricity has now been decidedly outweighed by the two hours of developer-time you spent updating it.

> Where is it that you live that is so resource constrained, in both bandwidth and electricity?

My home, in the UK.

We actually have a pretty good deal on bandwidth compared to most people here, but wasting several gigs just to download patches every few days is absurd.

The electricity isn't really the issue (though bills for that have risen far above inflation in recent months) but the heat generated by running that machine and all its accompanying peripherals full time is relevant at this time of year.

Besides, why kill the planet pointlessly? A staggering amount of precious resources are wasted because people leave equipment in power-draining stand-by modes all the time these days.

> Also it's fair to say that whatever you've saved in electricity has now been decidedly outweighed by the two hours of developer-time you spent updating it.

Presumably I would have had to spend at least the same amount of time spread out over those two weeks if I'd applied each patch as it became available, probably more because much of the software uses rolled up patch releases so I probably avoided a few intermediate steps.

I think my general point, that the amount and size of downloaded patches in modern software has become absurd, stands.

I don't think it is fair to lump "frequent updates," "large updates," and "background updates" into a single category:

Frequent updates, if properly managed, are generally a plus: security vulnerabilities get patched before they are widely exploited and minor bugs can be fixed without waiting for a major release. Other than the minor annoyance of downloading and installing frequent updates, I don't see a negative.

Unnecessarily large updates are always negative. If different patching practices would compress a 300 MB update to 15 MB, then there is absolutely no reason to prefer the larger patch. Apple is notorious for this: every software "update" requires downloading an entirely new piece of software (note: this is likely changing in Lion).

Background downloading and patching is a matter of preference. It's something I love in a web browser because of the security updates, but would be much less welcome in professional tools. Since it's a matter of opinion, I don't have much to say here.

> Other than the minor annoyance of downloading and installing frequent updates, I don't see a negative.

The negative is that every time you change the functionality of your software, you risk usability and integration problems. See the way Firefox 5 is repeatedly being slaughtered on Slashdot -- normally a forum that strongly advocates for successful OSS projects -- this week.

Not the person you were replying to, but I live in a remote mountain community in the North Cascades. I'm merely the IT Coordinator, but we run a business quite well, and we do it because giving people a retreat in these remote mountains is our business. Simply upgrading Firebug often takes a couple minutes.

As a primarily front-end dev guy, these auto updates make me happy. I don't have to waste time working around old browser quirks if the vast majority of people are on the latest and greatest browser versions.

Yeah, it seems to be a bit of a leftover from the days when each major version was radically different and customers would demand to stay on an old one.

I like Chrome's way much better, even though I admit it does play a bit of havoc with the enterprise-y types that don't use standards-compliant sites.

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