Hacker News Reader

Comment by lean | Hacker News Reader

So why hasn't Firefox implemented this yet? They've already said they are moving away from version numbers, but I still get the "You need to update, do you want to?" and "You've updated, now stop what you're doing and restart".

Chrome has eliminated both of these dialogs (that used to be browser standards), and the FF dev team is usually responsive enough to adopt new, good ideas quickly. So what gives?

View on HN

Because Firefox is very plugin driven, and its current design disables plugins that aren't compatible.

It is not in the best interest of users to have their plugins disabled automatically as a "feature".

Can't they just stop making changes that cause plugins and extensions to break?

I know that would be easier said than done, but Chrome seems to do a good job of it.

AFAIK, Chrome plugins still have much less access and power than Firefox plugins, which makes it easier for Chrome.

Firefox addons are traditionally written using the same API the browser itself uses. That's what makes them much more powerful than Chrome extensions, but clearly more fragile to breakage.

They're starting to offer a separate extension SDK (formerly called Jetpack) that allows extensions to ignore the internal API and build against something more stable. Such add-ons can be installed without requiring a restart, and should be much easier to update, but many important extensions need more power than currently provided. (Ad block is a good example.)

As is vimperator and pentadactyl.

In short: Not with the old API. In this recent newsgroup post, you can see a list of the things that could break an extension, and it's a lot.

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_t...

The work to solve that is mentioned in the thread.

This is the tail wagging the dog. The plugins are going to be broken whether the update from 3 to 4 happens manually or automatically (and, if anything, discourages manual updating despite all the popups).

Windows has had binary compatibility for decades. Why not just version the internal browser API? (Extension XYZ was built against FireFox 3.6).

>Windows has had binary compatibility for decades.

Extensions don't just run on top of Firefox, though; they modify Firefox's UI in arbitrary ways.

>Why not just version the internal browser API?

Firefox already does this, and automatically disables incompatible extensions.

Some people do not want automatic update. They prefer having total control on their software (think entreprises or free software fanatics).

Fanatics? No. Normal users too. Some people just don't like having magic.

I think the enterprise would benefit greatly from auto-updating. How many enterprise users today are stuck using insecure browsers?

Often times they are stuck using insecure browsers because some archaic piece of in house software depends on obsolete features only present in dated versions of browsers. They choose to skip updates because they don't want to spend the cash rebuilding the timekeeping system to work with anything other than IE <= 7.

Stated another way, for most large enterprises, the functionality of intranet in-house browsing for internal systems is more important than public web browsing. And this really is true for the enterprise's day-to-day business and ultimately profitability. Once you understand that, it naturally follows that the corpus of installed software and updates will be controlled to favor the former case at the expense of the latter.

This kind of thinking is what has lead us to the sorry security state we are in today. Why do we allow our providers to dictate to us that insecure software is a requirement for running their software. If enterprise pushed back on vendors for this issue we would be better off.

It isn't their fault alone. Lots of software has backward-compatibility breaking changes all the time. Maybe if all platforms ensured all existing applications worked correctly with every update, maybe by extraordinarily thorough testing or something.

You see, enterprise PCs are centrally managed and admins don't want something breaking because of the smallest of updates. They want to test their updates for a long time before they are pushed down to users. Auto-updating is exactly the opposite of what the enterprise wants, IMO.

Yes, which has led to countless other problems because users are running insecure browsers. Admins always want control, but it's not always better for anybody but the admins who justify their existence. I'm currently deploying a project in a business environment and we're requiring Chrome because of its auto-updating feature.

I didn't get either of these form 4 to 5 or 5 to 6. Fx automatically downloaded in the background and updated the next time I restarted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com