I'm the Director of the Firefox Desktop product (I wasn't at the time of the move to the new release cadence) and I agree with you 100%. We've been busting our butts for the last couple of months to get our updates ironed out and smooth. We've already shipped some of this in Firefox, including not nagging users to restart, killing the "What's New" tab that would interrupt your start-up, and reducing the number of incompatible add-ons by helping users get rid of add-ons they never requested (add-ons that were sneakily installed without user consent.)
We've got "install add-ons in the background" code finished and in testing. We've got "bypass the UAC prompts" code finished and in testing. We've got add-ons defaulting to compatible with a blacklist for broken ones (reversing from a default to incompatible with a whitelist) coded and it's in testing. We'll be shipping these in Firefox 10 and 11 so the remaining bits are going to arrive very early in the new year.
I'm really hoping you can get the remaining 3.6.x users to force-upgrade. We still have a couple people using 3.6 on our web app (where some pages won't render properly--we've labeled this 'wontfix' in our system since Firefox 7.0+ renders these pages properly.)
Any word on whether there is any way to get them to upgrade? Last I saw, it upgraded them to a newer 3.x version, but then opened a page on your site with a tiny-font-sized line of text that said "This isn't the latest version"--not exactly obvious that 3.6.x is pretty much ancient at this point.
There are still extension issues causing me to wait. Also, I should probably start a fresh profile, and the effort is not something I'm particularly looking forward to.
Plus, the "Chrome wannabe" interface changes just piss me off. ;-)
Seriously? Heck, 3.6 isn't exactly a slouch when it comes to web standards, particularly compared to IE, Konqueror and some of the "smaller" engines. What features are you using that 3.6 won't render right?
Also, FF4 was released only 8 months ago, and FF3.6 received a security update less than a month ago. "Ancient" my ass.
Can you say anything about the "push" to 3.6 users? It was suppose to happen last week. I just checked on http://gs.statcounter.com and usage dropped .4% in the last week, but I'm not sure how accurate it is:
>I hope unnoticeable updates become the norm for all desktop software.
As long as you can turn that off, sure. I don't like software bypassing my package managers. Firefox is so far the sole exception I'm okay with since I'm using the Nightly builds and don't update as often. But for everything else, that would be a nightmare. I like to be in control of my updates, thank you.
It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?).
Package managers are a great upgrade from having to manually update individual applications, and are still great for servers or other cases where upgrading can break crucial pieces of infrastructure - but for consumer desktop applications, there's no reason to waste your time doing sysadmin work.
When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)
I don't see how package managers and developer pushed updates are incompatible concepts. Installing chrome adds a repo to my apt sources, it updates with the rest of my system, weekly and silently. I don't waste my time doing sysadmin work, and I get an up to date browser.
For some things? Absolutely. For everything I currently use? The three hours I spent last week downgrading my Xorg thanks to a botched nvidia driver update force me to disagree.
Granted, it was an nvidia driver update; I should have known better. But that's exactly my point.
Was the nvidia driver update forced upon you and done behind your back? Or - did you do that intentionally and broke (by accident) stuff?
If the latter (and that's what it sounds like to me), isn't that totally unrelated to silent software updates and just anecdotal bad press about the nvidia driver and its stability?
He is saying something he wants to control the updates on, obviously the important stuff. The video driver is very important, but the browser is also very important, since a lot of people would not be able to get work done without it.
Exactly. I chose to update my video driver, so I knew what broke.
Imagine that update had happened automatically. Perhaps the day before a big deadline -- a stellar choice for disaster to strike! Now I'd have no clue what just broke and now I'd have to spend hours fixing it.
>It's time to let go and trust the developers of the software you're using to know when updates are stable, or when you really need a critical bug or security fix (if you don't trust them, why are you running their software anyway?).
I agree partially. My point is that you absolutely need the ability to turn it off. Always. But I'm fine with it being the default because that's what is most useful for the majority of users.
>When everything is a web app you'll have to get over it anyway. :)
You'll have to pry locally running programs out of my cold dead fingers. Web apps are fine for incredibly simple things. For everything else, they are as much buzzword bullshit bingo as the cloud.
That makes sense for security fixes and other internal issues. I would love an update that makes things faster. What I object to are auto-updates that change the user interface. In my opinion ANY interface changes should be user directed. If the new interface is better in some way, take the time and explain why.
No way. A new release of my CAD software always screws something up. Unfortunately, it seems like some software is just too old and complicated to test thoroughly and cost effectivly.
Already the version number isn't really advertised -- especially compared to Fx 1 through 4. However, it is an incredibly useful thing to know if you ever need support.
Version number shouldn't be dropped, however it should be, has been and will continue to be deemphasized.
That's great to hear. Update-fatigue drove me away from Firefox. Chrome raised the bar with their seamless update system, I'm glad to hear that FF is up to meeting the challenge!
We've got "install add-ons in the background" code finished and in testing. We've got "bypass the UAC prompts" code finished and in testing. We've got add-ons defaulting to compatible with a blacklist for broken ones (reversing from a default to incompatible with a whitelist) coded and it's in testing. We'll be shipping these in Firefox 10 and 11 so the remaining bits are going to arrive very early in the new year.