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Someone from Google Switzerland wrote up a study on browser upgrades: http://www.techzoom.net/publications/silent-updates/index.en http://www.techzoom.net/publi

by wyday 17y ago

Someone from Google Switzerland wrote up a study on browser upgrades: http://www.techzoom.net/publications/silent-updates/index.en http://www.techzoom.net/publications/silent-updates/index.en . He came to the same conclusion, namely that aggressive automatic-upgrades lead to faster distribution of the stabler more secure versions. Google seems to be taking a "website for the desktop" approach to the browser upgrades. If Google updates their homepage, the user gets the new version the next time they visit it. Ditto for their browser - the next time they start Chrome it's upgraded seamlessly without bothering the user with the details. We take the same approach as Google Chrome with our suite of updater tools (http://wyday.com/wybuild/ http://wyday.com/wybuild/ for anyone interested). We've found it's lead to better input (less duplicate bug reports) and faster sales turnaround. We haven't done a definitive study of our customers' customers, it'd be interesting to see if they got the same results.

ErrantX 17y ago
I like this in Chrome; the only thing I would prefer is that Dev build updates were notified. It's a pain to suddenly have my favourite web pages crash on me and have to work out if it is due to a recent upgrade or other unrelated issue (so I can put in a bug report). (the crashing doesn't worry me; that's what the dev build is for)
- cdr 17y ago
  I think I agree. I don't mind even dev builds updating silently, but I would really at least like a notification afterward.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    > but I would really at least like a notification afterward. oops, yeh that's what I meant. Some kind of notification bubble in the top right with the update info.
buro9 17y ago
I hadn't seen your tools before, and they're really nice. I would definitely be using them were it not for the fact that my clients have locked down environments that do not have internet connections. Do you support enterprise distribution servers so that clients could host a server where updates were collected and then they could centrally select which machines got the updates (i.e. Dev today, Test in 2 weeks, Prod after 3 months)?
- wyday 17y ago
  Unfortunately we do not, yet. It's on our short list of features to-do.

by wyday 17y ago

ErrantX 17y ago

I like this in Chrome; the only thing I would prefer is that Dev build updates were notified. It's a pain to suddenly have my favourite web pages crash on me and have to work out if it is due to a recent upgrade or other unrelated issue (so I can put in a bug report). (the crashing doesn't worry me; that's what the dev build is for)

cdr 17y ago
I think I agree. I don't mind even dev builds updating silently, but I would really at least like a notification afterward.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  > but I would really at least like a notification afterward. oops, yeh that's what I meant. Some kind of notification bubble in the top right with the update info.

buro9 17y ago

I hadn't seen your tools before, and they're really nice. I would definitely be using them were it not for the fact that my clients have locked down environments that do not have internet connections. Do you support enterprise distribution servers so that clients could host a server where updates were collected and then they could centrally select which machines got the updates (i.e. Dev today, Test in 2 weeks, Prod after 3 months)?

wyday 17y ago
Unfortunately we do not, yet. It's on our short list of features to-do.