I download Opera weekly (Yes, I get the weeklies and the betas too, but they are more stable than the Firefox and the IE ones) and reapply the upgrades manually.

Still, with your attitude, I might just as well sign that person’s words.

Ooogla boink uug uug! Boink! Ooogla ooogla uug Opera uug! Firefox uug ooogla! Boink ooogla ooogla boink update manager!

Anyway, all my thought about this post can be found in previous comments. I won’t reply to these useless comments again.

…and some people still wonder why FF Zombies have such a bad reputation all over the net.

I didn’t do a clean install. The sysadmin(s) (presumably) did that, as well as installed two versions of Opera and three versions of IE, plus a 0.8.something Fx. Our Linux machines have Epiphany, Konqueror, Opera and Firefox. Our Mac machines have IE, Safari, Opera, Camino and Firefox.

Whether the security updates break something or not, I don’t know, and I don’t care. It’s not my job to upgrade software and I don’t want to be molested by things that feel the urge to update themselves at their whim.

How many programs and applications do you have? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? What if each and every one of them included automatic updates? Would you be able to work and/or use your PC in a normal fashion, or would you endure numerous update popups per day and a ton of bandwidth used? Where do you draw the line between “this software should update if it thinks it’s necessary” and “damn you, ugly programming garbage, I’ll update when *I* think it’s necessary”? Why should such a line be drawn in the first place? Would you say a browser SHOULD upgrade itself, but the rest of the apps, including the OS, shouldn’t? What if your hardware became sentient, wanted to upgrade itself and had access to your credit card? What if four alley cats suddenly found your home a suitable place to live, and you didn’t have enough money to feed both them and yourself because of the hardware that upgraded itself and maxed out your credit card? Etc…

No, disabling that didn’t work on my PC, and two other ones. We didn’t try it on the fourth computer, I admit, because we all share the same drive image…

I’m sure that’s not standard behaviour and something is screwed up on our PC’s, but the fact remains that the software is nagging us with something that we really can’t even do - I’m the only one with admin rights on my PC (but without the time to reinstall and possibly break stuff), so I _could_ upgrade, but the rest of the people can’t.

Talk about overkill!

If you are smart enough to know that you can upgrade later, you are not a regular user. (And if you are that smart, you should know that you can turn the automatical checking/updating off in preference/option window).

I have Firefox 1.0.something at work (don’t honestly know which version, nor do I care), and you know what?

It’s bloody annoying.

Every once in a while, it will pop up a notification dialog, saying I should upgrade to 1.0.7. Well, no, damn you, I’m in the middle of working, and I’m not going to upgrade anything right now. Go away. And it goes away. For a short period. Then it pops again. And all the time, the little red updating arrow is fixed in the upper right corner, annoying the hell out of me, and four of my co-workers who are also running 1.0.something (two are running 1.5 RC3 because they’re uber-geeks who need to have every last version of every last program installed).

Dialogs that ask people to upgrade something are as annoying as popup ads on the web. People don’t want to see them. The users are perfectly capable (or at least they think) of upgrading software themselves (or calling the sysadmin to do that for them as an excuse to take a coffee break while the guy is working). Software having control over the user is a bad, bad thing.

BTW, wanna know how the matter was finally resolved?

We had our network admin block our subnet from accessing whatever URI Firefox tries to query for updates.

P.S. As for Fx developers having a clue about anything, well, it took lots of sponsored $$$ to perform a basic study about tabs that showed something that Opera has had for ages. I wouldn’t put any money on them, since the HCI concept seems to elude their grasp.

You’d be amazed at the number of times I’ve walked over to someone else’s desk and they’ve had Firefox open with that little red updater icon, and done nothing about it. Keep in mind that through FF 1.0.7, the updates have all(?) been security fixes and bug fixes.

In short, people need either automatic security updates, or an update notice that will catch their attention… or else they won’t update, and they’ll still be using a version that’s insecure and/or more buggy than the current release. The Firefox developers learned this, which is a big part of why the updater was a central part of the push for 1.5.

As for Linux/BSD, Firefox’s updater is disabled if you don’t have write permission to the app directory. What I’ve been doing is when I hear about an update, I close Firefox, su and run it as root, then hit “Check for Updates.” Once my distro (Fedora Core) releases RPMs for Firefox 1.5, I’ll probably remove the app from /usr/local and go back to the yum-managed package.

Personally I think it should still be possible to notify a non-admin user of an update, since the app can’t really tell whether it’s dealing with a single-user home system running as an ordinary user or a multi-user system with a full-time admin.

1. UNINSTALL OPERA. Yes. Dont worry - all your profile, settings, mail, cache, bookmarks, skins etc are NOT DELETED.

2. INSTALL new version into same directory.

Ready! New version + all your settings here.

I’m just saying that no product should pop up some dialogs that say “hey, there’s a new version, do you want to download it transparently?” or “I’ve downloaded and upgraded myself, all for your computing pleasure”.

Opera has a “Check for new release” menu item. It has to be clicked on manually, and that’s fine. Honestly, I don’t know what happens now when another version is found, but the proper thing to do would be to point the user to Opera’s download page if the user chooses to upgrade, then a link to the upgrade (complete or incremental, it doesn’t matter) should be presented to the user, and the final choice left to his preference.

That’s why I’m asking if Opera *really* needs an update manager.

However, the upgrade process MUST let the user roll-back in case something goes wrong. And that should be accomplished via the “Add & Remove Programs” in Windows, or whatever else in other operating systems, respecting the general OS guidelines.

In case of a clean install, the user should be presented with an easy and understandable option of importing his bookmarks, mail & newsfeeds, browsing history, etc. The old version shouldn’t be uninstalled automatically.