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True, but there is an important difference between Chrome background updates and Windows Updates: Windows Updates are easy to disable, and, in our experience, f

True, but there is an important difference between Chrome background updates and Windows Updates: Windows Updates are easy to disable, and, in our experience, frequently are disabled by users for various reasons. Users find that they hate trying to reboot (or start up) one day and then wait for 30 minutes while their computer does nothing more than display a "Now installing update 3 (of 30)..." screen. (This is especially obnoxious on big Windows Server installations where this process can take a server down for an entire weekend.) Or they hate being nagged all the time that there are updates available. Or they hate having their computer insist every five to ten minutes that it needs to be restarted now. Or they're gun-shy about it because an update once changed the layout of Windows Live Mail and left them completely confused about why it was suddenly so different even though they hadn't changed anything. In one fun case, we had a corporate client disable automatic updates for their entire research lab because one night Windows update decided it needed to automatically reboot every single system there. They were running overnight experiments and came in the next morning to find that all of the night's data was missing or corrupted, costing them a day on a tight schedule. Microsoft does software updates in a very, very wrong way, and that means that a rather large number of people think it's better to just ignore the updates.

com2kid 14y ago
Windows Update is very configurable, both through AD policies and on a per user basis. If a machine shouldn't be auto-updating, set it to manual reminders. Plain and simple. As for updates, in my experience they are generally small and fast to install once you have gotten over the initial update push of a clean Windows installation. And of course in domains, you can setup custom update roll outs, no need to use MS's update servers. Finally, for servers, install the OS onto an SSD. Updates will take seconds. Problem solved. While it would be nice if more components could update without restarts (and I think people forget how much better things are now than they used to be!), the fact is every major piece of software out there requires restarts to install updates. Of course there are awesome-cool Linux and other OSs that do not require restarts (IBM obviously has had that tech for ages, really cool stuff), but with how Windows is designed (back-compat first), that isn't likely coming any time soon. I've also had long running work disrupted by Windows update. The simple solution was to check "Ask before installation". Problem solved. (And to be honest, Browser restarts are just as troubling to me now days as rebooting my entire PC!)
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  Everything you said is technically correct, and helpful to some people, but it doesn't change the fact that most users opt to simply disable automatic updates in one fashion or another. Manual updates, and "download-but-don't-install" are both different from the Chrome example, and in both cases, will cause IE to not be immediately patched for all of its users even once Microsoft pushes an update for it. And, if I may push back just a little bit more: "install an SSD" should ideally never, ever be a serious solution to the problem of software updates. I'd like to think that I'd have the good grace to be completely embarrassed if I ran a software company that had advocates telling other people that my long update process could be "solved" by installing an SSD. Not that you're technically wrong.
  - cooldeal 14y ago
    >but it doesn't change the fact that most users opt to simply disable automatic updates in one fashion or another Most people disable auto updates? Do you have a reference for that or is that just your personal anecdote? Most people and PCs I've been auto update. Normal users don't even care to take the time to find out if they can be disabled. You can only force users so much. Installing updates and restarting is a default and people who go out of their way to prevent it deserve to take some responsibility, it's their machine after all, not Microsoft's nor yours. If Windows forced everyone to update and restart automatically without a way to turn it off, a lot of people will raise hell over it. Some people don't like even browsers autoupdating under them.
tjoff 14y ago
Yet I truly prefer windows update to chrome. Oh, so you wanted to SSH over your GSM tethered connection? Here, take this chrome update too! Don't mind that you'll never get it down this session. Also if you don't restart your computer you probably won't restart chrome either => no updates. Yes, chrome is probably more efficient but we truly need a way to signal that this connection is slow/expensive so don't do any heavy updates on it. Especially when we have no way of saying that we aren't interested in an update and don't care about any security issues within an application that won't be executed anyway. A friend of mine had a bad experience with steam which ate his 1 GB monthly quota in mere minutes (internet was down so he used his phone instead, didn't think much about having steam running in the background). Hopefully app stores will be in charge of updates. I don't feel like having a separate update service for every application running all the time.
- acdha 14y ago
  Quotas are definitely a problem but I disagree with your complaint about not restarting: Chrome has UI badges (and will eventually prompt) for pending updates. This is about as good as you can get short of forcing the user to restart.
  - tjoff 14y ago
    And windows update have balloon tooltips and an icon to inform me that an update is available... I update chrome and windows the exact same way. I get informed of an update and when I'm ready I let it proceed (yet I have no control over when chrome downloads an update).
cooldeal 14y ago
That's extremely funny and ironic, given that Chrome needs to restart to actually run the update. If you don't restart Chrome for a few days you're still vulnerable to the exploits while you're browsing. I left Chrome on my laptop for weeks on end a few times and it displayed an icon in the toolbar requesting(annoying!) me to restart Chrome and load all my 100 tabs super slowly again! And why are you comparing browser updates to OS updates which need to be much more robust? Here's Google updating Chrome OS dev build breaking things. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chrome-OS-Dev-Update-Bricks-Chromebooks-Here-s-What-to-Do-287572.shtml http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chrome-OS-Dev-Update-Bricks-C... >This is especially obnoxious on big Windows Server installations where this process can take a server down for an entire weekend. Really? Any references to this? I have seen a Windows 2003 small business server running on hardware from 7 years ago and it never took more than 10 minutes for it to apply updates even 3 or 4 months late.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  sigh It's only funny and ironic if you think that Chrome needing a restart is exactly the same as Windows needing a restart. You're a smart guy, I'm sure you don't think that. But, for what it's worth, I do think Chrome's update process could be even better. I have a copy of Joe Zobkiw's "A Fragment of Your Imagination" gathering dust on one of my bookshelves; it was a primer on building applications with plugin-style ('code fragment') architectures for MC68k and PPC. It was written in 1995, and with just a little bit of tweaking, it would have been possible to use the text in the book to build applications which could do hot upgrades. So this was a solved problem, in 1995 at the very least. And that's ignoring the microkernel example that Linux has blessed us with for so many years. That 17 years have passed and companies with Google's resources still can't build their applications that way makes me really grumpy. > I have seen a Windows 2003 small business server running on hardware from 7 years ago and it never took more than 10 minutes for it to apply updates even 3 or 4 months late. Never mistake your experiences for everyone else's experiences! OK, story time. Quick background: a good corporate client of ours got a new administrative manager, he accepted bids for a big-deal network & server upgrade instead of sticking with the relationship we had with the client, they ended up going with another outfit which sold them a wickedly overpriced server running SBS 2008, Active Directory, Exchange, the works. Some of the knobs were turned the wrong direction and even after sinking a lot of money into it the server couldn't do what the client wanted it to do in the first place. So we inherited a mess not of our design. We eventually get everything back to a stable state, and decide a while later that we should probably get the server caught up on updates. Now, the one nice thing about SBS 2008 updates is that the server will continue its AD and sharing services while it's preparing for shutdown and installing updates. The bad thing about it is that it doesn't give any time estimate and there's no sane way to cancel the update process once it's started. So, we make arrangements with the client -- they don't have failover for this -- and start the update process on a Friday afternoon. 8 hours later the update process finishes. I had a really unhappy tech at that point. It's a secure facility, we're not supposed to have any external or remote access, somebody needed to babysit the stupid thing on-site the entire time. Plus, we bill by the hour, so client's not super happy either. But, industry says we can't not install updates, right? So, a week later, we schedule the next round of updates. And it looks like it's going to do the same stupid thing again. Again, no ETA, no way to do just some of them and the rest later. No, it's just, "Now installing update 5 (of 70)...". For hours. I don't want to ruin my tech's Friday night for the second week in a row, so I tell him to go home and I make arrangements to be there first thing Monday morning to make sure everything's copacetic. On Monday morning, it wasn't. The update process had stuck somehow, somewhere around 59 of 70 or something like that. The server had never rebooted, we couldn't tell if it was truly stalled or if the update process was still continuing but just really really slow. Despite the huge warnings to the contrary, we had little choice but to hard reboot the stupid thing and do damage control afterward. Everything turned out OK, but there's nothing that'll move your breakfast through your bowels quite like rebooting a big client's "everything under one roof" server in the middle of an update. So. Go ahead and tell me how Chrome's update process is just like that. :-)
recoiledsnake 14y ago
>In one fun case, we had a corporate client disable automatic updates for their entire research lab because one night Windows update decided it needed to automatically reboot every single system there. They were running overnight experiments and came in the next morning to find that all of the night's data was missing or corrupted, costing them a day on a tight schedule. That is a small edge case on a consumer OS running on a billion PCs, maybe they should have had some half-competent people running the lab instead of having defaults that are meant for normal users? WSUS lets them have full control over updates and restarts. Most decent enterprises and univertisies use it. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.as... >Microsoft does software updates in a very, very wrong way Pray, tell us the right way. What would you have wanted Microsoft to do if there was this vulnerability that came today and the lab was running the research experiment for the next 3 days?
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  Did you actually want me to grace your stupidly rude comment with a reply, or are you just grandstanding? Let me know so I don't waste my time.
  - cooldeal 14y ago
    I am not the GP but I am curious about your proposed solution. You were comparing a browser updates to Windows Server, which could be running IIS running a bank website, Exchange server for mail or Lync/Communicator server. Does Apache do automatic updates for critical vulnerabilities? I hope you can either give better examples than Chrome for comparison, or actually give a solution to this problem which is not isolated to Windows, most distributions require restarts for kernel updates,. With that perspective, your post was the one that seemed to be grandstanding and railing at Windows Update without providing specific solutions. http://superuser.com/questions/283230/why-does-mac-os-x-need-to-reboot-for-updates-so-often http://superuser.com/questions/283230/why-does-mac-os-x-need... http://askubuntu.com/questions/32098/why-does-ubuntu-need-to-reboot-so-often http://askubuntu.com/questions/32098/why-does-ubuntu-need-to...
danielweber 14y ago
Chrome is a bit harder to disable, but eventually I figured it out once, when I got updated without my consent to a version that started breaking key websites that I use. There is no one right answer to how to update end users.

com2kid 14y ago

Windows Update is very configurable, both through AD policies and on a per user basis. If a machine shouldn't be auto-updating, set it to manual reminders. Plain and simple. As for updates, in my experience they are generally small and fast to install once you have gotten over the initial update push of a clean Windows installation. And of course in domains, you can setup custom update roll outs, no need to use MS's update servers. Finally, for servers, install the OS onto an SSD. Updates will take seconds. Problem solved. While it would be nice if more components could update without restarts (and I think people forget how much better things are now than they used to be!), the fact is every major piece of software out there requires restarts to install updates. Of course there are awesome-cool Linux and other OSs that do not require restarts (IBM obviously has had that tech for ages, really cool stuff), but with how Windows is designed (back-compat first), that isn't likely coming any time soon. I've also had long running work disrupted by Windows update. The simple solution was to check "Ask before installation". Problem solved. (And to be honest, Browser restarts are just as troubling to me now days as rebooting my entire PC!)

thaumaturgy 14y ago
Everything you said is technically correct, and helpful to some people, but it doesn't change the fact that most users opt to simply disable automatic updates in one fashion or another. Manual updates, and "download-but-don't-install" are both different from the Chrome example, and in both cases, will cause IE to not be immediately patched for all of its users even once Microsoft pushes an update for it. And, if I may push back just a little bit more: "install an SSD" should ideally never, ever be a serious solution to the problem of software updates. I'd like to think that I'd have the good grace to be completely embarrassed if I ran a software company that had advocates telling other people that my long update process could be "solved" by installing an SSD. Not that you're technically wrong.
- cooldeal 14y ago
  >but it doesn't change the fact that most users opt to simply disable automatic updates in one fashion or another Most people disable auto updates? Do you have a reference for that or is that just your personal anecdote? Most people and PCs I've been auto update. Normal users don't even care to take the time to find out if they can be disabled. You can only force users so much. Installing updates and restarting is a default and people who go out of their way to prevent it deserve to take some responsibility, it's their machine after all, not Microsoft's nor yours. If Windows forced everyone to update and restart automatically without a way to turn it off, a lot of people will raise hell over it. Some people don't like even browsers autoupdating under them.

tjoff 14y ago

Yet I truly prefer windows update to chrome. Oh, so you wanted to SSH over your GSM tethered connection? Here, take this chrome update too! Don't mind that you'll never get it down this session. Also if you don't restart your computer you probably won't restart chrome either => no updates. Yes, chrome is probably more efficient but we truly need a way to signal that this connection is slow/expensive so don't do any heavy updates on it. Especially when we have no way of saying that we aren't interested in an update and don't care about any security issues within an application that won't be executed anyway. A friend of mine had a bad experience with steam which ate his 1 GB monthly quota in mere minutes (internet was down so he used his phone instead, didn't think much about having steam running in the background). Hopefully app stores will be in charge of updates. I don't feel like having a separate update service for every application running all the time.

acdha 14y ago
Quotas are definitely a problem but I disagree with your complaint about not restarting: Chrome has UI badges (and will eventually prompt) for pending updates. This is about as good as you can get short of forcing the user to restart.
- tjoff 14y ago
  And windows update have balloon tooltips and an icon to inform me that an update is available... I update chrome and windows the exact same way. I get informed of an update and when I'm ready I let it proceed (yet I have no control over when chrome downloads an update).

cooldeal 14y ago

That's extremely funny and ironic, given that Chrome needs to restart to actually run the update. If you don't restart Chrome for a few days you're still vulnerable to the exploits while you're browsing. I left Chrome on my laptop for weeks on end a few times and it displayed an icon in the toolbar requesting(annoying!) me to restart Chrome and load all my 100 tabs super slowly again! And why are you comparing browser updates to OS updates which need to be much more robust? Here's Google updating Chrome OS dev build breaking things. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chrome-OS-Dev-Update-Bricks-Chromebooks-Here-s-What-to-Do-287572.shtml http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chrome-OS-Dev-Update-Bricks-C... >This is especially obnoxious on big Windows Server installations where this process can take a server down for an entire weekend. Really? Any references to this? I have seen a Windows 2003 small business server running on hardware from 7 years ago and it never took more than 10 minutes for it to apply updates even 3 or 4 months late.

thaumaturgy 14y ago
sigh It's only funny and ironic if you think that Chrome needing a restart is exactly the same as Windows needing a restart. You're a smart guy, I'm sure you don't think that. But, for what it's worth, I do think Chrome's update process could be even better. I have a copy of Joe Zobkiw's "A Fragment of Your Imagination" gathering dust on one of my bookshelves; it was a primer on building applications with plugin-style ('code fragment') architectures for MC68k and PPC. It was written in 1995, and with just a little bit of tweaking, it would have been possible to use the text in the book to build applications which could do hot upgrades. So this was a solved problem, in 1995 at the very least. And that's ignoring the microkernel example that Linux has blessed us with for so many years. That 17 years have passed and companies with Google's resources still can't build their applications that way makes me really grumpy. > I have seen a Windows 2003 small business server running on hardware from 7 years ago and it never took more than 10 minutes for it to apply updates even 3 or 4 months late. Never mistake your experiences for everyone else's experiences! OK, story time. Quick background: a good corporate client of ours got a new administrative manager, he accepted bids for a big-deal network & server upgrade instead of sticking with the relationship we had with the client, they ended up going with another outfit which sold them a wickedly overpriced server running SBS 2008, Active Directory, Exchange, the works. Some of the knobs were turned the wrong direction and even after sinking a lot of money into it the server couldn't do what the client wanted it to do in the first place. So we inherited a mess not of our design. We eventually get everything back to a stable state, and decide a while later that we should probably get the server caught up on updates. Now, the one nice thing about SBS 2008 updates is that the server will continue its AD and sharing services while it's preparing for shutdown and installing updates. The bad thing about it is that it doesn't give any time estimate and there's no sane way to cancel the update process once it's started. So, we make arrangements with the client -- they don't have failover for this -- and start the update process on a Friday afternoon. 8 hours later the update process finishes. I had a really unhappy tech at that point. It's a secure facility, we're not supposed to have any external or remote access, somebody needed to babysit the stupid thing on-site the entire time. Plus, we bill by the hour, so client's not super happy either. But, industry says we can't not install updates, right? So, a week later, we schedule the next round of updates. And it looks like it's going to do the same stupid thing again. Again, no ETA, no way to do just some of them and the rest later. No, it's just, "Now installing update 5 (of 70)...". For hours. I don't want to ruin my tech's Friday night for the second week in a row, so I tell him to go home and I make arrangements to be there first thing Monday morning to make sure everything's copacetic. On Monday morning, it wasn't. The update process had stuck somehow, somewhere around 59 of 70 or something like that. The server had never rebooted, we couldn't tell if it was truly stalled or if the update process was still continuing but just really really slow. Despite the huge warnings to the contrary, we had little choice but to hard reboot the stupid thing and do damage control afterward. Everything turned out OK, but there's nothing that'll move your breakfast through your bowels quite like rebooting a big client's "everything under one roof" server in the middle of an update. So. Go ahead and tell me how Chrome's update process is just like that. :-)

recoiledsnake 14y ago

>In one fun case, we had a corporate client disable automatic updates for their entire research lab because one night Windows update decided it needed to automatically reboot every single system there. They were running overnight experiments and came in the next morning to find that all of the night's data was missing or corrupted, costing them a day on a tight schedule. That is a small edge case on a consumer OS running on a billion PCs, maybe they should have had some half-competent people running the lab instead of having defaults that are meant for normal users? WSUS lets them have full control over updates and restarts. Most decent enterprises and univertisies use it. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.as... >Microsoft does software updates in a very, very wrong way Pray, tell us the right way. What would you have wanted Microsoft to do if there was this vulnerability that came today and the lab was running the research experiment for the next 3 days?

thaumaturgy 14y ago
Did you actually want me to grace your stupidly rude comment with a reply, or are you just grandstanding? Let me know so I don't waste my time.
- cooldeal 14y ago
  I am not the GP but I am curious about your proposed solution. You were comparing a browser updates to Windows Server, which could be running IIS running a bank website, Exchange server for mail or Lync/Communicator server. Does Apache do automatic updates for critical vulnerabilities? I hope you can either give better examples than Chrome for comparison, or actually give a solution to this problem which is not isolated to Windows, most distributions require restarts for kernel updates,. With that perspective, your post was the one that seemed to be grandstanding and railing at Windows Update without providing specific solutions. http://superuser.com/questions/283230/why-does-mac-os-x-need-to-reboot-for-updates-so-often http://superuser.com/questions/283230/why-does-mac-os-x-need... http://askubuntu.com/questions/32098/why-does-ubuntu-need-to-reboot-so-often http://askubuntu.com/questions/32098/why-does-ubuntu-need-to...

danielweber 14y ago

Chrome is a bit harder to disable, but eventually I figured it out once, when I got updated without my consent to a version that started breaking key websites that I use. There is no one right answer to how to update end users.