Chrome's Most Important Feature

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/08/chromes-most-important-feature.html

by Garbage • 15 years ago

113 98 15 years ago

googlesystem.blogspot.com

peteretep• 15 years ago

They may well be right, but boy does it /feel/ wrong.

What if it sucks down bandwidth when I'm on 3G? What if an update breaks something, and I'm in the middle of something that can't be updated? What if an update silently breaks the update process? Hrm!

wccrawford• 15 years ago

If you're in the middle of something, it isn't a problem. It doesn't update until you close the browser and open it again.

It's also really unlikely to break anything you might be doing from one version to the next, unless you're doing really experimental cutting-edge things... And then you probably want the update anyhow.

Flavius• 15 years ago

The 3G will cost you a few extra bucks. Can't live with that? Maybe you should try Internet Explorer, I've heard they're not planning to include such a feature anytime soon... :)

ThePinion2• 15 years ago

You should read this: http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software...

I reference that in your mention of 3G bandwidth usage. Chrome updates should be fairly tiny and bandwidth-friendly. Not always, but more often than not.. Especially on a beta/dev channel.

generalk• 15 years ago

It's like you've never actually experienced the autoupdater and are only responding to a rough description of the process. It's a HUGE win.

  > What if it sucks down bandwidth when I'm on 3G?

That might happen. What if it does?

  > What if an update breaks something, and I'm in the middle 
  > of something that can't be updated?

As per TFA (and experience): The autoupdater never interrupts you. The only UI change is one of the toolbar buttons changes subtly. Most of the time you don't notice that an update is ready to install. More to the point, after the update you usually don't even notice anything different.

  > What if an update silently breaks the update process?

There's absolutely no precedent for this, but honestly, who cares? This is hardly reason to shun the entire system.

Bottom line: The autoupdater makes sure I never care about the version of Chrome I'm running, just like a web app.

unwind• 15 years ago

That might happen. What if it does?

Then it risks costing me money, for doing something I've not chosen to do. For a feature described as "not worrying", that can be potentially very worrying.

aboodman2• 15 years ago

  > What if an update silently breaks the update process? Hrm!

This is part of why Chrome uses a separate application (Google Updater) to do the updating. Even in the worst-case scenario where we update to a version of Chrome that can't even start, the updater still runs and can later update to a fixed version.

riffraff2• 15 years ago

who updates the updater?

jonknee4• 15 years ago

Chrome saves a copy of the last version, so if an update breaks something there is something to easily rollback to, even without network access. The updates are also impressively small, thanks to Courgette.

larrik• 15 years ago

I notice on Ubuntu auto-update doesn't work. I wonder if this is a technological issue (they can't or haven't bothered to get it working) or a cultural one (like if Ubuntu programs shouldn't auto-update ever).

wrl• 15 years ago

My guess is that Chrome/Chromium is installed system-wide from a distribution package, and when you run it as a normal user you don't have write permission for updating it.

ThePinion2• 15 years ago

When you install Chrome/Chromium in Ubuntu it adds a repository for the channel (stable, beta, dev, canary) that you chose. When you update Ubuntu, via the Update Manager or the terminal, it will fetch the latest version of Chrome and install it.

bdonlan• 15 years ago

On Linux, the chrome team chose to integrate with system package managers instead of using their native updater - arguably the native updater would have worked better (many Linux distros still don't support delta updates!), but they wanted to buy goodwill with the Linux community.

adbge• 15 years ago

This is also the reason why there is no canary version of Chrome available on Linux: since packaging is so involved, it's not worth the effort.

exDM692• 15 years ago

It does not make sense for an application to autoupdate itself when there's a system wide package management with updates available. There are also other reasons that are more cultural than technical in nature.

If you want bleeding edge versions of Chromium (or some other popular program), there are non-standard/third party repositories available. Then you can get nightly builds but still update your system with the package manager.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

I agree with this. Chrome has effectively changed the entire nature of client-side computing with this feature. If you want to run stuff client-side any more (hello Windows? Anybody listening?), you're going to need to implement this.

In general, the user should extremely rarely be interrupted for anything, especially not anything program-related. Each program having a tray icon, an update alert, update restarts, and flow interruption because it thinks something is important is what has turned windows from a productive computing platform to some kind of cross between a Kafkaesque X-box and a slot machine.

Hawramani• 15 years ago

After getting used to Chrome's silent updates, I started to find it breathtakingly ridiculous the way Firefox kept interrupting its startup asking about updates. When I start Firefox, it is because I want to go to a website. Giving attention to updates is not what I want to do.

bmj• 15 years ago

My group is currently having discussions about the new paradigm of browsers updating frequently and silently. We currently have to support a wide array of browsers and versions for our apps (due to the nature of the product), and our QC group is grappling with how to manage this.

Personally, I don't think we need to worry about a Chrome or FF update suddenly breaking our apps--they don't use cutting edge HTML5/CSS3 features, and I don't suspect that either browser will suddenly change an HTML4 implementation.

Anybody else dealing with this same issue?

maratd• 15 years ago

While I've never seen an update cripple our software. I have noticed changes in rendering engines that change how things appear slightly. Minor stuff, only a few pixels here and there.

Also, I was forced to change our browser checking software to only do lower bound checking. Before, I would explicitly specify which versions were allowed. Now it's more like Firefox 4+, etc.

Florin_Andrei3• 15 years ago

Sounds like this is becoming The New Reality for web devs.

MarkMc• 15 years ago

Google have open-sourced their auto-update mechanism to a project called 'Omaha'. But it's so complicated an google-specific that nobody else seems to use it:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3711435/has-anybody-used-...

bjc2• 15 years ago

We use it. The server isn't open source, but it wasn't difficult to follow the protocol and create a Google App Engine app.

lean• 15 years ago

So why hasn't Firefox implemented this yet? They've already said they are moving away from version numbers, but I still get the "You need to update, do you want to?" and "You've updated, now stop what you're doing and restart".

Chrome has eliminated both of these dialogs (that used to be browser standards), and the FF dev team is usually responsive enough to adopt new, good ideas quickly. So what gives?

alttag• 15 years ago

Because Firefox is very plugin driven, and its current design disables plugins that aren't compatible.

It is not in the best interest of users to have their plugins disabled automatically as a "feature".

thatjoshguy2• 15 years ago

Can't they just stop making changes that cause plugins and extensions to break?

I know that would be easier said than done, but Chrome seems to do a good job of it.

kalid3• 15 years ago

This is the tail wagging the dog. The plugins are going to be broken whether the update from 3 to 4 happens manually or automatically (and, if anything, discourages manual updating despite all the popups).

Windows has had binary compatibility for decades. Why not just version the internal browser API? (Extension XYZ was built against FireFox 3.6).

tbassetto• 15 years ago

Some people do not want automatic update. They prefer having total control on their software (think entreprises or free software fanatics).

pnathan• 15 years ago

Fanatics? No. Normal users too. Some people just don't like having magic.

jonknee4• 15 years ago

I think the enterprise would benefit greatly from auto-updating. How many enterprise users today are stuck using insecure browsers?

abraham4• 15 years ago

I didn't get either of these form 4 to 5 or 5 to 6. Fx automatically downloaded in the background and updated the next time I restarted.

pornel• 15 years ago

Whenever I start Firefox it tells me:

"Stop! Whatever you were going to do, it couldn't possibly be more important than checking if fart-button-xpi has been updated from 1.0.4 to 1.0.5! Now just five more clicks and I'll restart"

sid02• 15 years ago

You must be running Firefox 3.6 then.

kalid3• 15 years ago

But that's exactly the point -- just manually update to firefox 4 and your problems will go away! Firefox 4 is only a few months old. Compared to previous firefox releases it's brand-new.

Supermighty• 15 years ago

Is the updater part of the Chromium open source package?

It would be pretty neat if someone use only the updater as part of other desktop software packages.

fbuilesv• 15 years ago

They have releases their updated as open source under the name Omaha: http://code.google.com/p/omaha/ Several of their products use it but afaik no other product is making use of it yet.

bitslayer• 15 years ago

Good thing they are still not evil. Seriously, this is a very powerful way to run software, but what if they, or some other company who emulated this idea, took that great power we have granted them and used it for evil? They could suddenly 0wn millions of computers.

exDM692• 15 years ago

Or if a company, maybe even Google, gets hacked and their distribution channels are used to send out poisoned software? That would be bad.

moheeb• 15 years ago

I could see Google being taken by force (read guns) and millions of computers sent the launch codes.

Joshua

WettowelReactor2• 15 years ago

And what if a competitor like Microsoft decided to do the same thing? They could just as easily release an update with undocumented features or how about the likes of secret updates? http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/microsoft-secret-update...

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

"It is magical because it continuously updates an entire development platform invisibly, frequently"

That "frequently" is every 30 minutes, by the way... I accidentally removed the goog updater from my Lil Snitch rules and noticed that it then started asking permission every 30 minutes, on the dot (I started recording the times for a while).

I don't know why it needs to check so often - except that that kind of data would be very useful for noting how often your users were on 'puters, and if they moved around etc.

lojack• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, were you allowing it to check? If you denied permissions I could see it asking every 30 minutes since it failed the previous attempt.

rmc2• 15 years ago

A hyper short time could be massively benefitial to security. Imagine a security bug fix that's installed on every browser within the hour.

duck• 15 years ago

That is true... but it can go the other way to: Imagine a security bug that is introduced on every browser within the hour.

Zakuzaa• 15 years ago

I think that must be once in 30 minutes polling not once in 30 minutes updates.

Florin_Andrei3• 15 years ago

Just curious - when does it do its first check? Immediately upon launch, or after 30 minutes of wait?

grandalf• 15 years ago

The only issue with this otherwise wonderful feature is that often when chrome starts doing something weird/broken it turns out it installed an update and is ready to be restarted.

So it appears there is a bug where the update messes up currently running processes.

covariance3• 15 years ago

Only those running admin accounts benefit from this feature. If you run Chrome in a limited user account on Windows 7, or a Standard User account on OS X 10.7, Chrome may or may not prompt you for an admin password (depending on the configuration). I've always had to quit all my applications, log out of my everyday account, login as admin, update, logout, then login again.

thatjoshguy2• 15 years ago

From my experience Chrome installs itself into %appdata% to avoid requiring admin permissions. And not once has Chrome asked for my admin password on OS X.

covariance3• 15 years ago

Right, that's one way of installing Chrome on Windows. However if you install Chrome for all users, then you pretty much have to start Chrome with an admin user's UID. I get prompted for my admin password on OS X, as I work in a standard user account.

wgx• 15 years ago

Nice, except Chrome doesn't update at all for a lot of Mac users (myself included)...

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=update+server+not+available...

So, hilariously, I have to totally remove the app and re-install to update.

jonursenbach• 15 years ago

Have never experienced that.

abraham4• 15 years ago

Reading the bug reports makes it seem to be mostly caused by third party applications screwing with the Chrome install.

eps2• 15 years ago

This will probably get downvoted quickly, but Chrome's updater is one of few things I quarantine on my machine. I just don't trust Google enough to let it run stuff that "works quietly in the background, never notifying you." The technology is interesting (though not exactly a rocket science and certainly not magical ... which it would've been if it could update a running instance of Chrome without restarting it), but I am wee bit uncomfortable letting a company who is in business of collecting data and tracking people to run anything in my background.

melling• 15 years ago

I just run the Canary build and get auto-updated nightly. Until Google does something egregious, why not just help them build a great browser as quickly as possible?

Google, and now Mozilla too, is essentially crowd-sourcing, hopefully throwing a few million extra eyes on the problem.

sixcorners2• 15 years ago

I have an idea what all the different channels that the different browsers have but I am uncertain if I have them all. What does everyone here think?

There are the four Chrome channels: http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

Chromium snapshots can be pulled from the buildserver: https://factor.cc/chromium.php

Firefox has the Stable, Beta, and Aurora channels: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/

Then there is the Firefox Nightly channel: http://nightly.mozilla.org/

Opera and Opera Next: http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

Safari and Webkit: http://www.webkit.org/

I guess IE is here: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Info/Downloads/Default.htm...

Is that all of them? I keep finding more.

abraham4• 15 years ago

And you are within your right to do that. But for non-tech elite that either don't care or would make an uninformed decision it is magical that they continuously the best features and security available with zero effort.

Florin_Andrei3• 15 years ago

I used to think the same way, but after letting the stable version do its thing for a while on several computers, mine and my relatives', with no issue whatsoever, I stopped worrying.

eps2• 15 years ago

Sorry, I don't see the logic behind this. You basically imply that if something works well, it must be benign, and this is clearly not always the case.

charlieok• 15 years ago

I haven't investigated this, but I'd guess you could add a "chrome" user, chown the chrome directory to that user, and basically give it permission only to touch the stuff in its own directory. Would that help allay concerns about auto-updating software?

There's some convenience/security tradeoff here anyway. I don't know about you, but I don't inspect the source code of most apps I install or update.

marbletiles• 15 years ago

"you can no longer decide that it's a bad idea to upgrade to the new version because of an annoying change."

Exactly what I dislike about the web app model; I want it even less in my client apps.

sixcorners2• 15 years ago

How much power do you have over updates now? When Skype destroys everything good about their UI aren't you still going to have to update eventually?

ominous_prime2• 15 years ago

I really want a Linux version of the binary with the updater. There's an open feature request for it, but no activity on it.

Flash is unfortunately still a requirement for a lot of websites. The 32bit binary chrome has flash bundled, so updates are received as quickly as possible (I know, I should run some flash-blocking plugin, but I don't right now). On 64bit Linux (which is what I need most of the time), you have to maintain the flash plugin separately, and run it through nspluginwrapper, which makes it much less stable in my experience.

You used to be able to run the 32 bit debs on 64bit Ubuntu, but that broke a couple versions ago, and I never had time to see if it could be fixed. You also lose the package manager updates when you do this, since apt isn't multi-arch aware.

abraham4• 15 years ago

Chrome has a built in "click to play" feature for plugins.

ominous_prime2• 15 years ago

D'oh, you're right. I completely forgot about that (it's still in the hidden flags setting though)

mberning• 15 years ago

I would have thought it's best features are that it's fast and clutter free compared to other browsers. Whether chrome updated every 5 minutes silently in the background or never updated at all would not make a difference to me.

adthrelfall• 15 years ago

Although it is a nice feature, for me the most important Chrome feature is unifying the address and search box. Even non-technical people know to respond to a software update prompts, but the number of people I see (including normally quite tech savvy people) that still search for a url, or enter a search in the address field surprises me. OK, you could argue it is bowing down the lowest common denominator, but I believe it's a great feature that saves the frustration of people that just want to do go somewhere or find something on the web quickly.

saturdaysaint• 15 years ago

It's nice, but I really don't find it vastly preferable to a friendly update notification and a quick application restart - especially now that most applications open in the state they were closed in, and with an SSD the restart is barely a blink. In fact, I like to know the feature additions or design adjustments happening to an app, so I enjoy the notifications - it's like I'm getting something for free (which I am, actually).

I don't think it's a huge advantage for average users, either - %90-percent of iPhone users are on the latest available major OS version, and that (until 5.0) involved a huge non-delta download, physically docking your phone and an onerous, lengthy (well over 30 minute) process, during which you had limited use of your phone.

yalogin• 15 years ago

Users in countries with slow/expensive internet connections will hate the feature. It might not even work as the machine is not connected to the network 24/7. And when its connected they do not want Google to use bandwidth for updating software. I know many people in India turn off autoupdate on their windows machines because it eats bandwidth (of course I try to talk them out of it).

yarone• 15 years ago

On a related note, for a side project that requires a windows download (http://www.getbugcam.com), I've been experimenting with Microsoft's "ClickOnce" installer + autoupdate technology. Obviously (per the name and Microsoft reputation), it's not quite as simple and straightforward as Chrome's autoupdate process, but it is pretty good.

For those interested in some of the available options for Windows apps, see here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37030/how-to-best-impleme...

hammock• 15 years ago

Chrome's Most Important Feature is autoupdate

In that case, the latest incarnations of Microsoft Windows ought to be doing pretty well for themselves.

Chrome's Most Important Feature

Related Stories