Why Silent Updates Work: Chrome 16 Passes IE9 in 2 Days

[crom]

Web browsers are a totally different animal than operating systems or applications though. Automatic updating in them is a key feature to keep them at their most secure. This allows for your average users who aren't very technical to experience the web as they normally would and be less likely to have their computers infected by a virus or malware and have that spam the rest of us or worse. I think its a very good thing for them to implement and Microsoft will only further hurt their market share of web browsers if they don't get on the band wagon. Apple, ironically, is the only one that doesn't do auto updates or has announced any sort of auto updating yet.

If you're a business that relies on old IE6 then virtualize it or rebuild your application to be more standards friendly, .NET can accomplish anything and everything the old activeX plugins did, and then some. The rest of the web shouldn't be kept back because of some legacy software.

Now Microsoft just needs to patch IE8 and IE9 to read CSS3 and be fully standards compliant with W3C.

 

[Netherscourge]

Silent updating is needed now for all Browsers - too many morons refuse to check for security updates on a regular basis and wind up getting hacked or accidentally installing keyloggers/trojans when they surf the internet.

Then they come here and complain about how unsecured their browser is and blame it on Microsoft, when it's really their own fault for not being more careful.

 

[Camikazi]

[citation][nom]iceman1992[/nom]Which one is correct?[/citation]
2 days is within 3 days

 

[alidan]

i dont fix anything unless its broken. windows patch... hell no, not unless its broken, fire fox came out with a new version... ill install it to a different folder and check compatibility...

but i have to say, i love chrome silently updating, and ill tell you why...

there is no mission critical applications that use it, at lest for me. going from the first version to now, the updates didn't matter at all to me, because they general increased performance, and added functionality without breaking anything.

ie is my fallback browser, if ff or chrome or opera dont run it right, ie will
fire fox has so many extensions on it, and even if i disable compatibility checks, some dont function correctly if at all.

opera... well anything 11.10 wont install on my computer, not sure why, it just fails, so good thing it doesn't auto update otherwise it wouldn't even run.

 

[Guest]

Silent upgrades are great. Unless you work in an organization like I do, a hospital, and the browser update breaks some piece of software a doctor needs to treat somebody who's sick. Then all hell breaks loose. Or people die. Literally. This is why we don't use anything but IE in our environment, because we need to be able to test browser versions before we roll them out to 2000 computers used to care for patients. Yes it would be lovely to always be on the latest version of everything, but that's a techies dream, not our doctors.

 

[cmartin011]

works for nearly all home user. even me which is surprising, have been using chrome and loving it no update to annoy me from my browser like ff. no halt of everything i do from microsoft (actually sometimes for hours because update would sometimes not even work...) now if they would do it so there are no problems....

 

[pjmelect]

I wouldn't want it to upgrade my IE8, IE9 breaks to many things.

 

[Guest]

Microsoft should stay with IE6, because it is the best browser ever! All this web 2.0 is pathetic and should be forbiden by law.

 

[eddieroolz]

This is not good. I had hoped Microsoft would be the last one that actually upheld ethics for browser updates. Just because silent update gets you browser usage shares, does not mean it is an acceptable practice.

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]jonahkirk[/nom]The difference, chrome just works. IE9 broke a bunch of programs causing me to roll it back and leave it uninstalled on a few systems. Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 Ultra would no longer read dvds or update (until eventually being patched). My son's Medtronic Diabetes software no longer functioned due to java-script incompatibility. Don't silently upgrade my IE Microsoft![/citation]

Thats not right. I had PowerDVD10 when IE9 went Beta, which i installed, and it worked fine. IE9 has nothing to do with how it reads the DVDs at all. I have since moved to PowerDVD 11 for Blu-Rays but still, that was an issue with PowerDVD more and I bet there was a patch.

As for your sons diabetes program, same thing. It was probably a Java issue more than IE9. Javascript is used in IE, and every browser, but changin the browser should not mess with it as Java itself is a seperate program that you have to install to use those features.

[citation][nom]pjmelect[/nom]I wouldn't want it to upgrade my IE8, IE9 breaks to many things.[/citation]

Like? Been using IE9 since Beta and yet to find anything vroken. If anything it actually works better on sites, except those expressly designed for IE8 but there is still a compatibility button for that.

 

[pjmelect]

IE9 breaks the ability to easily open attachments in Microsoft mail for example.

 

[jonahkirk]

But IE9 did break those things (I still upgraded on 3 other computers and eventually the HTPC when powerDVD did release a patch.) But, the upgrade broke dvd playback, and the online solution (roll back to IE8) fixed it. Note, this was powerdvd10 ultra and allowed bluray playback. This may have had something to do with the compatibility issue. I, also, don't understand why upgrading a browser would make dvds not play, but it did. I, also, due usually try to keep my systems updated, but I have had 0 issues with chrome, 1 with firefox and several with ie9

 

[billybobser]

silent updates for fixes, fine, silent updates to completely change interface and break all addons, not ok.

Fact is the google versions don't change a whole lot, whereas IE does the bug fixes without the need to change the version, which is usually for big changes where you would really want to know.

I don't like google's UI, and I don't like googles adsense, I can imagine that chrome will turn into an advertising platform itself, or use it's positions to collect more data.

Do not want.

 

[jkflipflop98]

LOL "OMFG my web browser just UPDATED BY ITSELF!!!!!"


Wow.

 

[mark0718]

What is MIGHT be OK for Chrome, which is a non-critical ad-on is one thing;
what is not OK for a browser that interacts with just about every installed program
on the system.

While you're at it, don't even think about automatically updating any of the programs
that I depend on working the same way, such as any accounting application (including
Excel) and anything that I might be using for a presentation (Power Point, Word, any
of the other office applications)

For accounting stuff in particular, things have to always give the same results,
even if the results are incorrect, unless I choose to make an update.
This goes for all software suppliers.

 

[Guest]

@jonahkirk

I'd direct those issuesz at PowerDVD, not IE - why is a DVD player using JavaScript in a way that depends on a particular version of a particular browser. Its not a web browser, its a media player.

 

[Guest]

I have IE9 on my system, though I rarely use it. I design websites for small area rock bands. I use IE9 for the "Worst Case Scenario" of what a website could come out looking like! Someone should notify MS that CSS3 is out, but I'm busy....

 

[Guest]

EULAs and Terms of Conditions etc are actually meaningless.
There is no way that any company can prove that you, the end user, actually clicked to agree to those terms.
It could have been done automatically by another person or even by software.

 

[Guest]

The real problem is still IE6 and their older OSes, I'm sure even with this "automatic update" it won't upgrade IE6. There is a lot of sensible people out there running Windows 2000 SP4 nicely on a single core computer using ~120MB of RAM, stuck with IE6, who would like to know exactly what makes Windows 7 better with its +600MB RAM and multi-core CPU requirements. Most of these users choosing to do this have moved onto Firefox or Chrome but the office workers on a domain enforced by group policy are still using IE6 (yes, really, in 2011). With IE 7&8&9 being tied to certain versions of Windows you wouldn't want to invest in it because you could safely assume, based on history, that IE17 won't install on Windows 7 when it comes out. What's the point in keeping IE up to date when you can assume at some point in time Microsoft will no longer allow you to keep it up to date? If I was to install Windows 98 today should I upgrade IE4 to IE6 or realize how pointless it is? By not upgrading IE users can safely assume that they won't be introducing new features that will need unavailable security fixes in the future. Add to this that a lot of people are using other OSes now and like using the same browser, which is fine if they use just about any browser that isn't IE. To a lot of sensible people IE is just plain dead and forcing an upgrade is a akin to digging up it's grave which is why people are getting upset about it.

 

[laureijs]

[citation][nom]internetlad[/nom]well, better start writing your own OS then. Pretty sure this will be in the MS EULA.[/citation]

please uninstall your AV

later