5 ms·

This really bothers me and I'm young, I am TIRED of applications FORCING restarts, and other garbage as a software culture. You are doing something? Oh sorry o

This really bothers me and I'm young, I am TIRED of applications FORCING restarts, and other garbage as a software culture. You are doing something? Oh sorry our developer team thought it would be smart to crash your whatever task you are doing by force to give you a 2 line changelog. Typing a dm on discord or talking to people? boom random restart to force update, using firefox nightly? sorry you cannot use it as your main browser because they can decide to brick your browser randomly to force you to restart. for no reason whatsoever, what is the downside of just warning people but not FORCE restarting? none. Doing critical stuff on your pc that requires long term uptime? sorry Windows will decide for you to restart forcefully (at least these can be turned off, for now, via group policy)

DiabloD3 3y ago
Re: Firefox, Firefox only demands restarting if you changed the copy of Firefox out from under it. This only happens if you're managing Firefox with an external package manager, or you're building from the repo and installed a new copy. If you run Firefox from its default mechanism, it will update itself and ask to restart before applying the update, and will continue working forever, never updating until you restart it.
- darklycan51 3y ago
  Might be the case now (Note, I'm talking about Nightly), this was a few years back, I noticed that first it warned that a new version was working and then mysteriously bricked the browser after, complained and they told me that I "shouldn't be using nightly if I don't wanna have the latest updates"... which I do, but I don't wanna be forced into a restart unless it actually breaks?
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Firefox Nightly is a branch specifically for testing and evaluating the newest updates. If you want reliability and consistency out of Nightly, the problem is you. You will get what you want out of the regular branch, and even more out of the Extended Support Release branch. As for Windows rebooting out of nowhere: Get a Professional or Enterprise license and turn autoupdates off via Group Policy and your problems are solved.
    - darklycan51 3y ago
      And this is exactly the comment I was talking about. Anyways for any sensible people, yes, Nightly is a branch specifically for testing and evaluating, doesn't mean you have to brick peoples browsers after some time when you push an update (again, back when I used it that was the behavior, according to a different comment it might be different now), to force a restart. "As for Windows rebooting out of nowhere: Get a Professional or Enterprise license and turn autoupdates off via Group Policy and your problems are solved.", yes, I already addressed this and mentioned this solution, but again, that doesn't change the fact that it's wrong in the first place, maybe actually read the comment you are replying to?
  - DiabloD3 3y ago
    I use Nightly exclusively. Unless you are somehow installing Nightly updates in a way that the binary is owned by a user who isn't you (ie, owned by root), Nightly will never force you to restart, it just forever has the green dot on the hamburger menu. This is true for me on both Windows (and my user is part of the Administrator group, thus can write to a global c:\Program Files install) and Linux (and Firefox is installed to a directory in $HOME to simplify the process of non-packaged binary management). Now, I also have Firefox (stable) installed as a .deb (to fulfill the browser dep). If the .deb gets upgraded by apt, that Firefox suddenly bricks itself until I restart. And this is intentional, btw, given how Firefox interacts with itself to do process isolation. Everything I say here has been true for roughly the past decade.
CoolCold 3y ago
> using firefox nightly? sorry you cannot use it as your main browser because they can decide to brick your browser randomly to force you to restart. I'm on Firefox beta for a year or so and never seen this - it politely shows update notice and that's all. Updates itself once I close all open windows of FF. Wonder why Nighly do different things here. From another side - running nightly is expected to be not the same smooth as stable release.
Etherlord87 3y ago
Restarting exists, because it's the simplest way to maintain a program. Do you expect a car mechanic to repair your car while you're still driving? It could be possible, but it would cost so much more, that no one even thinks to do it. Discord is a great example, because it's very far from being optimal in so many regards. It could be written in C++ and be so much faster, use so much less memory, it could be more reliable in many aspects… But because most people don't care, what Discord creators do is roughly the most meta-efficient (money efficient?) thing to do.

DiabloD3 3y ago

Re: Firefox, Firefox only demands restarting if you changed the copy of Firefox out from under it. This only happens if you're managing Firefox with an external package manager, or you're building from the repo and installed a new copy. If you run Firefox from its default mechanism, it will update itself and ask to restart before applying the update, and will continue working forever, never updating until you restart it.

darklycan51 3y ago
Might be the case now (Note, I'm talking about Nightly), this was a few years back, I noticed that first it warned that a new version was working and then mysteriously bricked the browser after, complained and they told me that I "shouldn't be using nightly if I don't wanna have the latest updates"... which I do, but I don't wanna be forced into a restart unless it actually breaks?
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Firefox Nightly is a branch specifically for testing and evaluating the newest updates. If you want reliability and consistency out of Nightly, the problem is you. You will get what you want out of the regular branch, and even more out of the Extended Support Release branch. As for Windows rebooting out of nowhere: Get a Professional or Enterprise license and turn autoupdates off via Group Policy and your problems are solved.
  - darklycan51 3y ago
    And this is exactly the comment I was talking about. Anyways for any sensible people, yes, Nightly is a branch specifically for testing and evaluating, doesn't mean you have to brick peoples browsers after some time when you push an update (again, back when I used it that was the behavior, according to a different comment it might be different now), to force a restart. "As for Windows rebooting out of nowhere: Get a Professional or Enterprise license and turn autoupdates off via Group Policy and your problems are solved.", yes, I already addressed this and mentioned this solution, but again, that doesn't change the fact that it's wrong in the first place, maybe actually read the comment you are replying to?
- DiabloD3 3y ago
  I use Nightly exclusively. Unless you are somehow installing Nightly updates in a way that the binary is owned by a user who isn't you (ie, owned by root), Nightly will never force you to restart, it just forever has the green dot on the hamburger menu. This is true for me on both Windows (and my user is part of the Administrator group, thus can write to a global c:\Program Files install) and Linux (and Firefox is installed to a directory in $HOME to simplify the process of non-packaged binary management). Now, I also have Firefox (stable) installed as a .deb (to fulfill the browser dep). If the .deb gets upgraded by apt, that Firefox suddenly bricks itself until I restart. And this is intentional, btw, given how Firefox interacts with itself to do process isolation. Everything I say here has been true for roughly the past decade.

CoolCold 3y ago

> using firefox nightly? sorry you cannot use it as your main browser because they can decide to brick your browser randomly to force you to restart. I'm on Firefox beta for a year or so and never seen this - it politely shows update notice and that's all. Updates itself once I close all open windows of FF. Wonder why Nighly do different things here. From another side - running nightly is expected to be not the same smooth as stable release.

Etherlord87 3y ago

Restarting exists, because it's the simplest way to maintain a program. Do you expect a car mechanic to repair your car while you're still driving? It could be possible, but it would cost so much more, that no one even thinks to do it. Discord is a great example, because it's very far from being optimal in so many regards. It could be written in C++ and be so much faster, use so much less memory, it could be more reliable in many aspects… But because most people don't care, what Discord creators do is roughly the most meta-efficient (money efficient?) thing to do.