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It never hit me before now, but I just realized that "constantly upgrading software" is only a thing because corporations are cheap and impatient. Web browsers
by 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
It never hit me before now, but I just realized that "constantly upgrading software" is only a thing because corporations are cheap and impatient.
Web browsers need to be constantly upgraded mostly because they need constant feature add-ons. They need constant feature add-ons because they want the browser to be able to render all the features of native apps with JavaScript/HTML/CSS, but they can't possibly develop every feature all at once. So they drip, drip, drip out the features. They also can't thoroughly test all the features ahead of time (permutations would require hundreds of millions, if not billions, of tests per release) so they kick the releases out to beta users and collect bug and crash reports, and fix enough of them to call it stable and then kick a release out.
Imagine if cars worked like that. "We know you're driving on the highway, but we need to reboot your car because we have a new feature (radio shuffle mode!)"
- hypothesis 5y agoI see frequently on HN this idea that big company behind said web browser can simply throw more devs at it, adding things and features (useful or not) and simply drown any competitors with churn of changes. But you still want security patches too, so you have to install and keep up to date with upstream. Is this also causing relentless update cycle? I think so.
- fulafel 5y agoBrowsers need to be constantly upgraded because of security vulnerabilities being found, disclosed and fixed as a steady, busy stream. To just keep up with features you could have at least an order of magnitude slower pace of updates.