Automatic Updates and Firefox
March 31st, 2007More and more applications have their own automatic updaters. I use several of them and the upgrade experience among them is good and bad. Paint.NET checks for an update when the application is started and gives you the option to download it and install it. Installing the update requires restarting the application. The experience is not bad, but not as smooth as others. Adobe Acrobat has the worst update experience. The updates come so often and offer no real value to an already extremely bloated program. It is supposed to be just a PDF reader but Adobe seems to be including everything to exploit their strangle hold over this file format. To make matters worse, the startup and update screen is hidden behind all of your other applications which causes your web browser to appear to freeze when you click on a link to a PDF accidentally. Adobe Acrobat is so bad that many websites warn you about the PDF links. The only way to escape this horrible application updater is to switch to FoxIt Reader which is lightweight and unobtrusive.
The Firefox upgrade seems to be the most non-invasive. When it discovers that an update is available it silently downloads the update and when you start the application the next time it installs the update. (You can configure the updating behavior) It is all automatic. But the fact that it is automatic can be good and bad. The Firefox 2.0.0.2 release broke Javascript behavior which affected many websites using AJAX. I got the update automatically without knowing about the problem. I would like the IT staff to have the tools to control what applications are updated with the option to skip problematic releases. I have heard that Microsoft is opening up the Windows Update to third party vendors for a fee. I hope it takes more than just a fee to get into the updater program. I would make it a requirement that a certain level of testing goes into each release before the automatic update is allowed. (There are plans for such testing in Firefox now)
In the meantime there are tools to control how Firefox is deployed to the computers in your office. The list of links below walk you through all of the steps to completely customize Firefox for your environment.
