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Comment by yottabyte47 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is at v18? Last I knew it was at v5. Guess they didn't waste any time in their quest to catch up with Chrome.

No, Firefox is at v15. v16 will be released on Oct 9th. Personally, I just run the Nightly (http://nightly.mozilla.org/) and get an update every day. It's simply "today's build."

The version number is meaningless. What is meaningful, however, is getting millions of people to help test beta browsers. If Chrome is your browser of choice then help test the Canary builds (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/chromesxs)

That joke never gets old, let's keep saying it every time a Chrome or Firefox version comes out! (Or like here, just because a Chrome or Firefox version number was mentioned in a random article.)

Joke aside, this whole rapid release thing is irritating when it requires me to restart my browser all the time.

You would otherwise restart your browser less frequently than every six weeks?

Pretty sure silent updates got rolled out around v15.

No browser AFAIK has the ability to patch a running process (it's very hard to do in general, but there are some ways to do it to a linux kernel for example). So you must restart to actually run the downloaded updates. Which means until you restart, you are running an unpatched browser which might have known exploits.

If each tab is a separate process, they could be upgraded one by one. You could even signal to each tab that it should open all links in a new process. Browsers are probably the app you could most easily transparently upgrade.

Not correct. Multiprocess browsers like Chrome don't actually run an entire browser in each process (that isn't realistically possible) because the individual tabs need to collaborate for the proper functioning of things like caches, cookies, etc.

If. If I can restart a web server without restarting memcache and have a new process handle new requests while the old process handles existing requests, it's clearly possible for a browser to change its rendering engine for new tabs.

The rendering engine, sure, but what about the rest of the browser? Cache, Cookie, Prefs, bookmarks, etc.

Browsers are not just rendering engines.

It's possible in theory, but very hard. None do it to my knowledge.

On Ubuntu, Chrome and FF updates are pushed through the repos and are updated through apt-get / Update Manager. It's not annoying at all, and works like clockwork. Kudos to Chrome, FF and Ubuntu!

On Windows, Chrome does a good job auto update in the background. Firefox am not so sure but they too are working on some kind of auto update. Good for them, not being stubborn, and implementing a good feature that their rival has.

Good for Chrome that they aren't suing others trying to implement auto update. :-)

"All the time" == "Once every six weeks"

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