Batching add-on updates...
Justin Dolske
One common complaint about Firefox is that it "updates too often". It
has been suggested that users may actually be complaining about frequent
*add-on* updates, and not Firefox security updates.
The thought struck me that we could help mitigate this by batching
add-on updates so they occur less frequently. As a simple example, have
AMO defer advertising updates until the first Wednesday after the update
is approved. Consider a user with lots of frequently-updated extensions
installed -- instead of experiencing an update nearly daily, they would
then see just a single, weekly batch of updates.
I can think of a few potential issues:
* Add-on security updates should still have the ability to be pushed
more frequently. So, let's assume this would not apply to security
updates (and that add-on authors have a way to tag updates as such).
Manually doing a "check for updates" should also bypass batching, and we
could have a pref for users who don't want batching.
* Add-on authors will probably not be thrilled about waiting another
week for their users to be updated (especially after waiting, in some
cases, multiple weeks for their update to be reviewed/approved). But I
think this is a win for users, who I'm more concerned about.
* The batching could just be done by the browser, which would let us do
things like only deferring the update only if the user has already
installed an update within the last few days. This would help for
add-ons not hosted on AMO.
* Silent / unprompted add-on updates may be an even better solution, if
we're planning on doing that anyway (are we?). Batching would be
something we could do in the short-term, though.
Thoughts?
Justin
Jorge Villalobos
I prefer the silent update solution.
Delaying updates for as long as a week is too much for authors; they
already have to wait a very long time to see their updates pushed. Also,
policing the urgency flag would require more work from the editor team.
We have our hands full already, and the upcoming release of 3.6 is not
going to help.
I wonder how many updates are too many for users. I have several add-ons
installed, and I don't think I get notified for updates more than once a
week. I'd like to see what the real impact of this change would be
before considering implementing it.
- Jorge Villalobos