Re:Safari 5
by upinsmoke on Tuesday June 08, 2010 @06:38AM
(#1413485)
You are not only upgrading Safari. You are upgrading Webkit as well! And it is used in many other apps, like iTunes. Webkit is very much integrated into OS X. That's why it needs to restart.
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It shouldn't be very to hard to generate a list of running apps that link against the updated libs and ask the user for permission to restart them... Or let the user ignore it at own peril.
Almost everything is (potentially) linked against WebKit (At least judging by how broken my system when a rogue rogue flash plugin broke webkit.). Certainly Finder, for example. It could just get away with enforcing log off/log on again, but if multiple users are logged in it is probably simpler just to restart. "Ignoring at their own peril" will almost certainly result in horrible crashes.
Why would there be crashes? The running apps will keep their already loaded binary until they're restarted.
Maybe there'll be some bugs in handling shared on-disk resources (cache, and maybe something else?), but I doubt that those parts change very often. That would be a reasonable reason to require a reboot, but unless those parts actually change it should be avoided.
Sparkle (the update framework) uses WebKit, so everything that uses Sparkle links against it.