Firefox 12 Released — Introduces Silent, Chrome-like Updater 411
MrSeb writes "Firefox 12 has been officially released, with only one major new feature: A silent, background updater. Now you will have to approve the Firefox Software Updater when you first install Firefox, but after that the browser will update silently — just like Chrome. In other news, the Find feature now reliably centers the page on any matches — hooray!"
Here are the release notes, the list of bug fixes, and the download page.
Re:Gahhh!! (Score:5, Informative)
This is exactly what the Firefox extended release [mozilla.org] is for.
Re:Gahhh!! (Score:4, Informative)
Who said anything about root access? If Firefox is running with root privs, you are doing something wrong. Also, the silent updater is optional.
-d
Re:Well I guess I'll just have to... (Score:2, Informative)
Or don't, as they will are compatible by default now.
Re:So it has come to this. (Score:5, Informative)
someone hasn't seen the latest benchmarks on tomshardware then.
Firefox is just barely but is beating chrome and IE in speed for last 2 versions..
Chrome fanbois are about as bad as Appletards
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Now I won't have to go 10 rounds with the wife to keep the ff on her mac up to date.
Alternatively, you could just move her to Firefox Extended Support Release [mozilla.org], which is what I did at home as soon as it was available. She'll still get the security patches, but won't get overloaded by all the pointless monthly "updates for the sake of updating".
Re:Gahhh!! (Score:1, Informative)
This is a non-issue. You can get a chrome MSI right now and the GPO object, push it out, and disable automatic updates and just update the next MSI when you're done testing.
Re:Lazy devs strike again. (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking of lazy devs, from the linked release notes [mozilla.org]:
Known Issues
UNRESOLVED
Windows: The use of Microsoft's System Restore functionality shortly after updating Firefox may prevent future updates (see 730285 [mozilla.org])
Apparently not only does something already go wrong, it can prevent your from ever being able to update Firefox again! (Without deleting your current profile, reinstalling won't work!)
But who cares, according to the calendar, it's release time NOW!
Re:Gahhh!! (Score:0, Informative)
Chrome runs entirely under the user profile, installs under the user profile, and installs updates under the user profile. Does not require "root access" or any admin privileges to run, update, or install. Your entire +3 post is based on rubbish.
Firefox does require admin rights to run, because it's an insecure turd.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
I mean, you can do what you want obviously but your logic is terrible. Firefox updates don't actually break computers (at worst they could break the browser causing you to... use a different one for the few hours before the fix comes out) and people really do get viruses which really do break their computers or, in the more likely case, turn their computers into bots and steal their financial information.
Re:It's not just like chrome... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Chrome also installs a service which runs as LOCAL SYSTEM, just like Firefox now has. Local system is higher than administrator, it's kernel level, for all intents and purposes.
If someone breaks the Chrome service, then it's just as bad as breaking the Firefox service..
You can disable auto-updates (Score:5, Informative)
You can disable auto-updates, regardless of whether or not you're running the extended support version.
Preferences -> Advanced -> Update.
You can also download every version of Firefox we've ever released here [mozilla.org]. We have no interest in forcing users to run the latest version.
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Re:What's best (Score:4, Informative)
You realize GPOs can export files (including config.js) and registry settings across an organization, right?
Re:What's best (Score:5, Informative)
Which is why they announced an enterprise version with slower updates for enterprise users, right?
Re:What's best (Score:5, Informative)
The sad thing is that you are a fucking idiot. [mozilla.org]
12 is out and in other news (Score:4, Informative)
As of today 3.6 will no longer receive any security updates. So all of you netbook/low power users need to find an alternative, or bite the bullet.
Re:It's not just like chrome... (Score:4, Informative)
You completely misunderstand the nature of the threat here. The attacker can get the user to run some malicious program under his normal privileges. That program can then communicate with the update service that's running under a privileged account. If the update service has some bugs or is badly designed such that it can be exploited, the attacker has now elevated his privileges from normal user to LOCAL SYSTEM (which is basically root).
Re:Finally (Score:4, Informative)
Actually March 2013:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar [mozilla.org]