Silent - not forced - updates coming to Firefox

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 10 August 2010 19:39

Business IT - Open Source

Mozilla is planning to introduce silent security and other updates to Firefox 4.

The popular open-source web browser Firefox currently gives users two choices about how updates should be handled: the program will either alert the user and ask what to do, or automatically download and install the update.

The Windows version of Firefox 4 will go a step further and provide the option of silently downloading security and other minor updates.

Part of the reasoning is that too many people don't understand that most of the updates delivered for Firefox are security patches and for various reasons elect to ignore them.

"For Firefox 4 minor updates will occur automatically," Firefox principal designer Alex Faaborg said in a post to the mozilla.dev.apps.firefox Google group. "We'll only be using the major update dialog box for changes like 4 to 4.5 or 5," he added.

Users will be able to make a preference change so that Firefox 4 handles updates in the traditional way. This is in marked contrast to Google's Chrome, which automatically downloads and installs updates as they become available.

Why is it so important to update web browsers? See page 2.