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Asking the user if they want to upgrade only makes sense if it can potentially mess something up, like dropping support for something or changing file formats,
by Rusky 15y ago
Asking the user if they want to upgrade only makes sense if it can potentially mess something up, like dropping support for something or changing file formats, or take long enough to interrupt their train of thought, like old Firefox updates.
Otherwise, asking the user is unnecessary and gets in the way. In browsers, for example, any changes to the rendering engine will have to be backwards compatible and any changes to the interface will be minimal as there's not that much too change. Chrome's model does really well here.
The version number itself can be anything you want, as long as it's relatively simple- it's really only necessary when the user is troubleshooting, so it just needs to be easy to say over the phone or compare to something on the web.
- yuliyp 15y agoChanges by definition can mess things up. From a user's standpoint, if there's no issues that they're seeing, moving to a new version offers unknown gain for unknown loss. The unknown loss can be estimated by the user's previous experiences with the developer, while the gain can be estimated based on the change log. Just a couple weeks ago hundreds of thousands of SmoothGestures users learned the perils of auto-updating when an update introduced phone-home mechanisms into an extension which ostensibly does mouse gestures.
- latitude 15y agoPerhaps I am an odd one out, but as a user I really do not like software that updates itself, leave alone silently like Chrome does. As a developer - sure, I would love for everyone to be on automatic updates, but looking at stats it appears to be not the case. I have an app out that checks for updates and prompts the user if there's a new one. That's the default setting and it can be changed to disable all checks or switch to an automatic updates. Looking at the server logs I can tell that users do disable the update checks after the first notification, a lot of them do, like close to 25-30%. And virtually no-one switches to the automatic updates. YMMV obviously by an app and the OS, but it's still a data point to consider.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoYour users don't want to be bothered by notifications. Automatic updates sound scary; they don't trust that your changes will always benefit them. It's easier to just turn the notifications off.
- jsherer 15y ago"Automatic Updates" makes me think of the Windows updater. Most have painfully experienced this at least once in their life.
- Rusky 15y agoHow do you feel about web apps? They update themselves automatically and generally frequently. I think that's what Chrome is aiming for and in my experience it works well. For something like a browser where both security and features for developers depend on everyone updating, leaving the majority of users on an old version is just a bad idea.