{"id":80,"date":"2007-12-02T20:16:35","date_gmt":"2007-12-02T19:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tmachine1.dh.bytemark.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/12\/02\/an-example-of-how-not-to-do-software-updates\/"},"modified":"2007-12-02T20:16:35","modified_gmt":"2007-12-02T19:16:35","slug":"an-example-of-how-not-to-do-software-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2007\/12\/02\/an-example-of-how-not-to-do-software-updates\/","title":{"rendered":"An example of how NOT to do software updates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I upgraded Firefox only a few days ago (I didn&#8217;t get a choice &#8211; it was set to autoupdate, and updated when I was halfway through doing an install on my new computer; it broke most of the plugins I was halfway through installing because the new version wasn&#8217;t backwards compatible) and now a new upgrade just appeared. I wondered what could necessitate such a sudden new upgrade, so I clicked on the &#8220;View more information about this update&#8221; link in the dialog box.<\/p>\n<p>This took me to a page which said nothing other than:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Stability Update:<br \/>\n    This release corrects a problem that was found in the previous release, Firefox 2.0.0.10.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>WTF? How did that even seem to them to be a reasonable explanation? So, I sent them some feedback. Which will no doubt get filed in \/dev\/nul<\/p>\n<p>Someone at firefox needs to reconsider the messages they&#8217;re sending out. It&#8217;s as bad as Microsoft in the bad old days of System Updates that had no reason beyond &#8220;critical&#8221;, or &#8220;this update is necessary to ensure your copy of windows continues to function correctly&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Considering how dangerous updates are for the user (c.f. the fact that the last one nuked most of my plugins :(, and there&#8217;s no way to downgrade &#8211; for some reason, they don&#8217;t support that, and they don&#8217;t allow you to download old, working, versions, only the latest, even-if-its-broken, version), this approach to forcing them on users without explanation is both antagonistic and irresponsible.<\/p>\n<p>\/me is now forcing firefox to &#8220;never&#8221; upgrade, and will refuse to run any more upgrades of it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure this is the complete opposite of what they intended, as my machines will now theoretically be vulnerable to every security flaw that comes along, but I think I&#8217;ll use MSIE 7 as my main browser, despite it&#8217;s many flaws, and stop using FF for everything except testing, rather than suffer more of this stupidity from the Mozilla Foundation. I never thought they&#8217;d manage to force me into the hands of Microsoft :).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I upgraded Firefox only a few days ago (I didn&#8217;t get a choice &#8211; it was set to autoupdate, and updated when I was halfway through doing an install on my new computer; it broke most of the plugins I was halfway through installing because the new version wasn&#8217;t backwards compatible) and now a new [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}