4 ms·
10 years ago, I found some software updates annoying. 5 years ago, I found most of them aggravating. Now, I find them to be outright harmful except for rare cas
by fiblye 6y ago
10 years ago, I found some software updates annoying. 5 years ago, I found most of them aggravating. Now, I find them to be outright harmful except for rare cases.
It's very common for (particularly mobile software) to just break the product entirely. Features I regularly used and depended on--sometimes even the main features--are just deleted. Gone, with zero chance of using it again. Sometimes ads are thrown in, adding a major vulnerability. Other times they reduce/cripple features, yet somehow worsen performance despite doing less. Sometimes they wipe data. Sometimes they update and suddenly require a google or facebook login to use "for convenience" (inconveniencing me who never needed to login before).
Updates before used to be bugfixes and cleanup, and major upgrades came out every year or two and you'd have to manually opt in to those by going to their site and downloading a new version, or going out and paying for it. Now your old, functional software is wiped from your system and replaced with a bad imposter using the same identity.
I'll begrudgingly install OS updates sometimes, but only weeks or months after release when all the downsides and upsides are easy to consider. The chances of me coming across some harmful vulnerability in the wild is far less likely than the reality of dealing with a harmful, work-destroying update. I haven't encountered the former in over a decade. I've dealt with the latter several times this year.
- shawnz 6y agoCan you give me an example of the last time you faced a harmful, work-destroying update? Because that hasn't occurred to me in any product for years, and I always install manufacturer updates the day they are released.
- fiblye 6y agoThere was a recent update to some PLC software that I use daily that integrates with other software for the display device and allows both to execute at once. It recently broke won't allow both pieces of software to run in test/monitoring mode simultaneously without crashing and without saving. This is software meant to be used on actual, moving, industrial hardware. A few updates have been released this year since that bug, but none have addressed this issue. I've had to be very careful when working on active machinery because it's very easy to accidentally trigger it, and each time comes with the risk of accidentally breaking some very expensive machinery (or injuring people).
- mekpro 6y agoWindows 10 update frequently shipped with broken side-effect, sometime its WSL, sometime Docker, so on. My last strow is the last month update which made Starcraft II broken.
- unionpivo 6y agoFirefox on mobile a few days ago. We developed an extension for client, as part of a solution. Now it doesn't work on most of clients phones anymore, Client is quite upset (we told him this might happen, but he is still upset and wants us to fix it, we still haven't found a robust solution that wouldn't be either total rewrite or side loading old unsupported browser)
- lostmyoldone 6y agoApple decided that /anaconda was an illegal place to store files during an update, so not only did I have a mysterious upgrade who took a very long time (hours) even on SSD, I also lost half a day when I needed to run some calculations for my client, as my Anaconda (python data science etc) was broken. The latter happened just the other week. A few years ago, Windows mistook my root/system partition for the boot partition, which it helpfully "cleaned" by removing ALL executable files. Don't remember the trigger for that one. Another Mac OS X update broke my Samsung color laser + scanner. A few years ago, still broken. Recently the scanner was broken by another update. At first it was only the printer. I'm sure there are more, but thos were the first I could recall.