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Comment by hdjrudni | Hacker News Reader

I was a little sus, so I checked: https://imgur.com/a/AJFQjfL

897MB! But it appears to have installed itself twice for some reason. Maybe one is an 'update' which it didn't clean up...? I'm not sure.

Edit: I just opened it and it cleaned itself up. 408MB now. I guess it was in the process of upgrading.

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So the upgrades are not delta diffs either?

Even if it’s delta, it cannot patch itself when running on Windows. So it runs the updater, creates a new exec and switches to it after relaunch. Same as Chrome or Firefox.

OS deficiency. And maybe programs shouldn't be allowed to update themselves.

> maybe programs shouldn't be allowed to update themselves.

Honestly I'd be all for this if the OS had a good autoupdate mechanism for 3rd party applications. But that's not the world we live in. Certainly not on windows - which is too busy adding antivax conspiracy articles to the start menu.

Is it? On Linux, you can overwrite the file, but the underlying inode will still be open, and the 'invisble' old version will linger around - you don't have any easy way short of restarting everything to make sure the new versions are being used.

And with Chromium this directly leads to crashes - when you update the browser as its open, the new tabs will open with the new version of the binary, with the old ones still using the old binary - which usually leads to crash.

I prefer 'you cannot do X' instead of 'we allow you to do it, but it might misbehave in unpredictable ways'.

I don't use Chromium. I never had issues with Apache, MySQLd, Firefox, Thunderbird, ... . You can even swap out the Linux kernel under userspace it still keeps all running.

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