In my opinion, Mozilla should have put more effort into seamless background updates before starting their 6-week release cycles. (Unleash the fanboys...)
We've got "install add-ons in the background" code finished and in testing. We've got "bypass the UAC prompts" code finished and in testing. We've got add-ons defaulting to compatible with a blacklist for broken ones (reversing from a default to incompatible with a whitelist) coded and it's in testing. We'll be shipping these in Firefox 10 and 11 so the remaining bits are going to arrive very early in the new year.
I have to ask, when do you plan on dropping the version number from Firefox releases?
As long as you can turn that off, sure. I don't like software bypassing my package managers. Firefox is so far the sole exception I'm okay with since I'm using the Nightly builds and don't update as often. But for everything else, that would be a nightmare. I like to be in control of my updates, thank you.
Package managers are a great upgrade from having to manually update individual applications, and are still great for servers or other cases where upgrading can break crucial pieces of infrastructure - but for consumer desktop applications, there's no reason to waste your time doing sysadmin work.
When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)
Granted, it was an nvidia driver update; I should have known better. But that's exactly my point.
Was the nvidia driver update forced upon you and done behind your back? Or - did you do that intentionally and broke (by accident) stuff?
If the latter (and that's what it sounds like to me), isn't that totally unrelated to silent software updates and just anecdotal bad press about the nvidia driver and its stability?
Imagine that update had happened automatically. Perhaps the day before a big deadline -- a stellar choice for disaster to strike! Now I'd have no clue what just broke and now I'd have to spend hours fixing it.
Intrusive updates shouldn't be automatic.
I agree partially. My point is that you absolutely need the ability to turn it off. Always. But I'm fine with it being the default because that's what is most useful for the majority of users.
>When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)
You'll have to pry locally running programs out of my cold dead fingers. Web apps are fine for incredibly simple things. For everything else, they are as much buzzword bullshit bingo as the cloud.
- When you're using an access point operated by someone you don't trust
- When you want the best performance out of your system but need to have a browser open
- When any spike in latency could have bad consequences
- (possibly) when there's a significant chance of the computer losing power instantly and without warning
Five reasons I don't auto-update anything.
EDIT: spelling
Version number shouldn't be dropped, however it should be, has been and will continue to be deemphasized.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20111129...
I imagine that there are many 3.6 users who simply aren't into tech news like those of us here, and they simply don't know they should upgrade.
Any word on whether there is any way to get them to upgrade? Last I saw, it upgraded them to a newer 3.x version, but then opened a page on your site with a tiny-font-sized line of text that said "This isn't the latest version"--not exactly obvious that 3.6.x is pretty much ancient at this point.
Plus, the "Chrome wannabe" interface changes just piss me off. ;-)
Also, FF4 was released only 8 months ago, and FF3.6 received a security update less than a month ago. "Ancient" my ass.
(as Chrome has several advantages such as TV ads, billboards ads, included with all major software and often without an easy way to opt-out, ads on all major websites including the most major one, various lock-in attempts with major sites supporting stuff only Chrome provides, etc, while Firefox's advantage was just being there first)
Note that it's the above that makes me stick with Firefox - and also that lately it's been actually better than Chrome in many areas.
So, what's different now is that add-ons must move faster to keep up because we're not just shipping security and stability updates frequently, but actual feature updates that can break add-ons. Our big problem is not the noisy updates, but the add-on incompatibility. We're hard at work on that but it's a tough problem.
Whereas Firefox still gains users, it doesn't gain them as fast as the competitors and it seems to me that it is due to the bad press (even if from uninformed users, or from Google 'evangelists'). The bad press mainly came from the update issues, even thus some are gone now. That's the point I was raising.