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How times have changed. Not too long ago people loathed automatic updates and some said they're boycotting Firefox for having an autoupdate feature.

by asomiv 15y ago

Gormo 15y ago
Many still do. I've been using SRWare Iron and as my primary browser - it's Chromium with the privacy-compromising features removed - in part because I'm very uneasy about software being modified by stealth on my system. In this era when the unfortunate trend in UI design is to make interfaces easier by making them less functional and less customizable, I also especially want a good look at redesigned major-version updates before I install them
- mirkules 15y ago
  I think there are just more users these days that are more vocal about wanting stuff done in the background. I'm in your camp, though -- I don't want stuff happening behind the curtain. At best, I would like an option to turn that off. I imagine a lot of web devs would be upset if their browser suddenly updated to the latest version without keeping the old one somewhere...
  - Silhouette 15y ago
    This is 100% true: I switched on our super-workstation at the office a couple of days ago for the first time in a couple of weeks. It's a bit of a hungry beast, so only usually switched on when we need the power. It took more than two hours of me sitting at the workstation to apply all the updates. I had to manually approve more than a dozen different installations, one after another. We used multiple gigabytes of our monthly bandwidth allowance just to download the patches. This is a recently set up machine, just a couple of months old. Only a carefully chosen set of software is installed, all of it for professional use. Commercial software is all legal. Open source stuff is all recommended versions from master sources/repositories. I don't like the idea of auto-updates either, certainly not for things that make any sort of functional change. But I have to wonder, if this is the best the modern software world can offer to people who have real work to do, whether auto-updates for security patches and genuine bug fixes aren't worth it. I also have to wonder whether the world is really a better place now that on-line patching is routinely available. Software companies used to have to get something into a fit state to sell before they started selling it, because patching something afterwards was prohibitively expensive and shipping a product with serious flaws would get you a bad reputation and cost a lot of money.
    - sbierwagen 15y ago
      What an odd story. Where is it that you live that is so resource constrained, in both bandwidth and electricity? And why are you trying to run a business there? Also it's fair to say that whatever you've saved in electricity has now been decidedly outweighed by the two hours of developer-time you spent updating it.
      - Silhouette 15y ago
        > Where is it that you live that is so resource constrained, in both bandwidth and electricity? My home, in the UK. We actually have a pretty good deal on bandwidth compared to most people here, but wasting several gigs just to download patches every few days is absurd. The electricity isn't really the issue (though bills for that have risen far above inflation in recent months) but the heat generated by running that machine and all its accompanying peripherals full time is relevant at this time of year. Besides, why kill the planet pointlessly? A staggering amount of precious resources are wasted because people leave equipment in power-draining stand-by modes all the time these days. > Also it's fair to say that whatever you've saved in electricity has now been decidedly outweighed by the two hours of developer-time you spent updating it. Presumably I would have had to spend at least the same amount of time spread out over those two weeks if I'd applied each patch as it became available, probably more because much of the software uses rolled up patch releases so I probably avoided a few intermediate steps. I think my general point, that the amount and size of downloaded patches in modern software has become absurd, stands.
        m3koval 15y ago
        I don't think it is fair to lump "frequent updates," "large updates," and "background updates" into a single category: Frequent updates, if properly managed, are generally a plus: security vulnerabilities get patched before they are widely exploited and minor bugs can be fixed without waiting for a major release. Other than the minor annoyance of downloading and installing frequent updates, I don't see a negative. Unnecessarily large updates are always negative. If different patching practices would compress a 300 MB update to 15 MB, then there is absolutely no reason to prefer the larger patch. Apple is notorious for this: every software "update" requires downloading an entirely new piece of software (note: this is likely changing in Lion). Background downloading and patching is a matter of preference. It's something I love in a web browser because of the security updates, but would be much less welcome in professional tools. Since it's a matter of opinion, I don't have much to say here.
  - ChrisLTD 15y ago
    As a primarily front-end dev guy, these auto updates make me happy. I don't have to waste time working around old browser quirks if the vast majority of people are on the latest and greatest browser versions.

How times have changed. Not too long ago people loathed automatic updates and some said they're boycotting Firefox for having an autoupdate feature.

by asomiv 15y ago

How times have changed. Not too long ago people loathed automatic updates and some said they're boycotting Firefox for having an autoupdate feature.

Gormo 15y ago

Many still do. I've been using SRWare Iron and as my primary browser - it's Chromium with the privacy-compromising features removed - in part because I'm very uneasy about software being modified by stealth on my system. In this era when the unfortunate trend in UI design is to make interfaces easier by making them less functional and less customizable, I also especially want a good look at redesigned major-version updates before I install them

mirkules 15y ago
I think there are just more users these days that are more vocal about wanting stuff done in the background. I'm in your camp, though -- I don't want stuff happening behind the curtain. At best, I would like an option to turn that off. I imagine a lot of web devs would be upset if their browser suddenly updated to the latest version without keeping the old one somewhere...
- Silhouette 15y ago
  This is 100% true: I switched on our super-workstation at the office a couple of days ago for the first time in a couple of weeks. It's a bit of a hungry beast, so only usually switched on when we need the power. It took more than two hours of me sitting at the workstation to apply all the updates. I had to manually approve more than a dozen different installations, one after another. We used multiple gigabytes of our monthly bandwidth allowance just to download the patches. This is a recently set up machine, just a couple of months old. Only a carefully chosen set of software is installed, all of it for professional use. Commercial software is all legal. Open source stuff is all recommended versions from master sources/repositories. I don't like the idea of auto-updates either, certainly not for things that make any sort of functional change. But I have to wonder, if this is the best the modern software world can offer to people who have real work to do, whether auto-updates for security patches and genuine bug fixes aren't worth it. I also have to wonder whether the world is really a better place now that on-line patching is routinely available. Software companies used to have to get something into a fit state to sell before they started selling it, because patching something afterwards was prohibitively expensive and shipping a product with serious flaws would get you a bad reputation and cost a lot of money.
  - sbierwagen 15y ago
    What an odd story. Where is it that you live that is so resource constrained, in both bandwidth and electricity? And why are you trying to run a business there? Also it's fair to say that whatever you've saved in electricity has now been decidedly outweighed by the two hours of developer-time you spent updating it.
    - Silhouette 15y ago
      > Where is it that you live that is so resource constrained, in both bandwidth and electricity? My home, in the UK. We actually have a pretty good deal on bandwidth compared to most people here, but wasting several gigs just to download patches every few days is absurd. The electricity isn't really the issue (though bills for that have risen far above inflation in recent months) but the heat generated by running that machine and all its accompanying peripherals full time is relevant at this time of year. Besides, why kill the planet pointlessly? A staggering amount of precious resources are wasted because people leave equipment in power-draining stand-by modes all the time these days. > Also it's fair to say that whatever you've saved in electricity has now been decidedly outweighed by the two hours of developer-time you spent updating it. Presumably I would have had to spend at least the same amount of time spread out over those two weeks if I'd applied each patch as it became available, probably more because much of the software uses rolled up patch releases so I probably avoided a few intermediate steps. I think my general point, that the amount and size of downloaded patches in modern software has become absurd, stands.
      - m3koval 15y ago
        I don't think it is fair to lump "frequent updates," "large updates," and "background updates" into a single category: Frequent updates, if properly managed, are generally a plus: security vulnerabilities get patched before they are widely exploited and minor bugs can be fixed without waiting for a major release. Other than the minor annoyance of downloading and installing frequent updates, I don't see a negative. Unnecessarily large updates are always negative. If different patching practices would compress a 300 MB update to 15 MB, then there is absolutely no reason to prefer the larger patch. Apple is notorious for this: every software "update" requires downloading an entirely new piece of software (note: this is likely changing in Lion). Background downloading and patching is a matter of preference. It's something I love in a web browser because of the security updates, but would be much less welcome in professional tools. Since it's a matter of opinion, I don't have much to say here.
- ChrisLTD 15y ago
  As a primarily front-end dev guy, these auto updates make me happy. I don't have to waste time working around old browser quirks if the vast majority of people are on the latest and greatest browser versions.