Lack of silent updates was one of the key reasons I switched from Firefox to Chrome (speed was another.) Seemed like every time I opened the browser to view a webpage I needed to see that very moment, Firefox would pop up an annoying update prompt that I'd keep clicking out of each time.

+1 - Interesting - that's actually why I've switched over to Chrome as well. Basically, every time I started up Firefox on my System at work on XP, Firefox would Freeze with a "Hey, we're going to upgrade you now - why don't you just go grab some coffee!" - So, slowly but surely, my goto browser started to become Chrome. The downside of this, is that, over time, I started firefox even less frequently, and, as a result, it was _always_ waiting for an upgrade. making it even worse.

Chrome just starts for me. I'm happy with it.

The funny thing is that from a Linux user's perspective, Google was simply providing a workaround for what should have been the OS's job. On Linux, Firefox's auto-updates are disabled so that the OS can handle that instead.

This is probably the best solution, as it gives you the most control over updates, and applies to all software system-wide. You're not forced to install updates at any time, and you can disable the notifications if you want.

The update popup for extensions is still annoying though - even on linux.

Like I said, you can disable that.

Many distributions' version of Firefox comes with that disabled out of the box.

And last I looked, that's how Chrome/Linux works too, at least on Ubuntu. When you download and install the deb, it'll set up apt sources so you get updates through the system.

Hah! At the moment I read "at that very moment", I got a popup from Chrome's PDF reader in the background tab I loaded the article in:

"Some slides have failed to load and may appear blank. Click OK to try reloading the presentation, or cancel to continue viewing."

So Chrome hasn't completely ridded itself of modal popups just yet, though it's happens infrequently enough that I was pretty surprised.

I also appreciate that when I close a tab, its memory is returned to the OS. My safari process tends to need killing once in a while, after it's been mean to my VM.

I always wonder why those update dialogs pop up when you start a program. That’s the one point in time when it is very clear that you definitely do want to use the program, the one point in time when you don’t want to be disturbed. Those dialogs would be a lot less annoying if they popped up when you quit the app, still allowing you to opt-out of updates but in a lot less annoying way.

One possible negative effect is that updates get installed later (an average session length later), I wonder whether that’s offset by people not installing updates when the browser starts because they have something better to do?

My absolute favorite in terms of updating is Calibre; an otherwise excellent app (albeit with a fairly "experimental" UI).

Calibre tells me about a new release every single time I open it, they seem to release almost daily.

Sadly the "update" button on that dialog merely opens the web-browser, where you have to manually download and install the new version. Oh, and that is a 60MB(!) download every time.

The procedure is so absurd that it's actually amusing again. That's why I'm still doing it, I guess, even though after 20 or 30 updates I still haven't noticed any visible change to the software.

That has happen to me sometimes with Chrome and every single time I think how cool it is that it updates itself and how cool it would be to just keep the bug free version around.

I rely heavily on the information saved by Chrome every time I use a form and I noticed how it doesn't save it when I use the beta version. Now that's fine because I can just use the last non-beta release just like everybody else but on the current one (at least on Windows 7) I can't access those saved values if the form is loaded by ajax into some iframe. It's really annoying.

It's not only less of a hassle, but veritably good for the web.

If only we could essentially rely on all our users' browsers being up-to-date!