▲ 5 points

Tell HN: Firefox Updates Too Frequently

by nateb2022·3y ago·6 comments·view on hn ↗

First a disclaimer. Firefox is a great browser, and my #1 choice.

However over the past 2-3 months I've noticed that the frequency of updates has increased. Most of these updates are of minimal impact, and in sem-ver language, are often patch releases.

While that is good and all, I, for the most part, don't want (or need) to update Firefox every time there's a bugfix that (most of the time) doesn't even apply to me. As an example, this morning I was prompted to install 106.0.1 (from my current 106.0) because of a single bugfix that affects users with AMD Zen 1 CPU's. I am on an M1 Mac. So yes, downloading a ~100MB update would be 1) unnecessary 2) wasteful, regardless of how little 100MB is in today's perspective (imagine how much that would be in 2003).

Yes, updates have gotten cheaper as compute and storage has increased over the years. But still, they all involve ~100MB each time, and in my opinion are somewhat abused in modern development cycles. Nobody except the Nightly crowd really cares about getting updates for each and every commit.

I acknowledge that this has become a problem with most software in general, but that is an issue to tackle another day. In the meantime, I would appreciate a setting to only be notified about Major/Security-Related releases. Suckless updates please.

6 comments

The fundamental fail is relying on each application to have an update policy you prefer thus needing to fix the same problem over and over and over. The solution is package management where you fix the problem exactly once and have some hope of tackling it. Although this isn't natively how mac handles software there are package managers for mac which could tackle this aspect.

If you want to update less often then you need someone to spend time classifying updates as more or less vital and this is fundamentally a problem. All updates contain fixed bugs and those bug fixes are often blueprints suitable for malicious actors to exploit systems even if the bug wasn't considered a security issue. That is to say all updates are security updates.

The obvious solution instead of only selectively installing updates to your browsers and other vital software is to be selective instead about when to apply them and restoring state afterwards. Firefox helpfully already can restore itself after update. You could for example having updates happen at an hour you are reliably sleeping rather than whenever.

On a system with package management I would solve this by either leaving the machine on and scheduling updates, having it wake on a schedule if bios supported, or waking it with wake on lan. This does require SOMETHING to be on. In my house I would use the single board computer I use for other purposes and have it simply wake my machine and use ssh to tell it to update then go back to sleep.

Yeah, there is this game for my Xbox 1S which has required multiple 50GB updates.

https://www.bandainamcoent.com/games/sword-art-online-aliciz...

It is pretty annoying when you sit down to play and it tells you you will have to wait a few hours for the update. I have a double ADSL connection which can handle this kind of download easily overnight but it sure takes the fun away.

I don't care about frequent updates but I hate the forced restart after an update.

Now I have disabled the automatic security updates in Ubuntu only because I can't just close my browser whenever Mozilla feels like it. I can't understand who thought this was a good idea. "Yeah, lets update the browser and then force them to reboot, who uses browsers for anything important anyway?"

Switch to Firefox ESR

On a side note, I wish that I was still on the Firefox Mobile Fennec engine... instead of Fennix.

I did keep Fennec for almost a year even if I didn't get updates, just to avoid the collection addon non-sense... finally caved in to get security updates.

Use a package manager and forget about it. I use Arch Linux, there are many updates each day for packages I have. I type in pacu (alias for pacman -Syu) whenever I want to, press Y and that's it, everything is up to date.