Like Google's Chrome, Mozilla To Silently Update Firefox 4

CWmike writes "Taking a page from rival Google's playbook, Mozilla plans to introduce silent, behind-the-scenes security updating to Firefox 4. The feature, which has gotten little attention from Mozilla, is currently 'on track' for Firefox 4, slated to ship before the end of the year. Firefox 4's silent update will only be offered on Windows, Mozilla has said. Most updates will be downloaded and installed automatically without asking the user or requiring a confirmation. 'We'll only be using the major update dialog box for changes like [version] 4 to 4.5 or 5," said Alex Faaborg, a principal designer on Firefox, in the 'mozilla.dev.apps.firefox' forum. 'Unfortunately users will still see the updating progress bar on load, but this is an implementation issue as opposed to a [user interface] one; ideally the update could be applied in the background.' Unlike Google, Mozilla will let users change the default silent service to the more traditional mode, where the browser asks permission before downloading and installing any update."

Comments

silent, or totally invisible

[gbjbaanb]

to be honest, I'm not so worried about this - its only a browser, and I install all those security updates anyway. What I'm not so keen on is the "silent, in the background, don't bother the user" implementation. I'd like to know that it is doing it, pop a little UI element on the status bar that says "updating latest version now" and then gets on with it, and then puts a little version marker somewhere so I know its been done.

Be polite to your users, be open in your communication, inform us. (and a link to the things that were fixed if you click the version number would be a nice to have)

Re:silent, or totally invisible

[Netshroud]

If only someone brought Sparkle to Windows...

Re:silent, or totally invisible

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not really unlike the IE privacy setting at all. By default, IE's privacy setting is off, and the user can easily do a one-off enable of it or they can enable permanently -- exactly like most other browsers' settings (though firefox makes the one-off enable kind of difficult).

The whole article earlier raised two points:

1. IE's privacy settings go further than other browsers, where it's mostly about not storing cookies whereas IE's tries to heuristically deny trackers and other things.
2. Somebody thought (1) was really useful and thought IE's default privacy setting should be on and that turning it off should be one-off.
3. They followed the common techie principal that engineers = good and marketing = bad and therefore decided that since (2) didn't happen, that's bad, and thus came from marketing.

Enabling privacy modes by default and making it opt-out would guarantee that legitimate standards-based sites would be broken. Cookies are the obvious problem and losing cookies is a potentially big user regression, but there are others, for instance, JQuery shares enough characteristics with a tracking pixel that it would be flagged and blocked; and there's obviously performance issues caused by dropping the cache on the floor.

Anyway, the point is, it's much the same, because despite the epic misinterpretations of an article with comments by one random guy on the Internet, there is a reliable way to permanently set IE to privacy mode, and there's a way to permanently disable Firefox's auto-update strategy.

As long as the browser asks for permission

[nebulus4]

why would this be considered a bad idea?

User Account Control

[Crock23A]

I wonder how this will get around UAC, a substantially annoying feature of Windows Vista/7. Will they be installing firefox to the user's home directory? Will it be sand-boxed from the OS? I admit I haven't done much looking into the pre-release so I apologize for any ignorance I might be showing.

Re:User Account Control

[sadler121]

Chrome has it's exe in APPDATA, that is how they get around UAC.

What if I'm not an administrator?

[wiredlogic]

I don't normally run as administrator on my computers. I have installed Firefox as an admin., though, and I must use that account for updates. This is slightly annoying with Firefox because I get update nag notifications under my user account which can't be used to perform the updates. I don't always want to go through the hassle of shutting down my current session and switching accounts for the latest update. I hope this new feature can be turned off to avoid additional problems with the update process.