Blacklist of software killing productivity with update notifications instead of doing it in the background
I got enough with all the software that is trying to update. I don’t want to go to a webpage, download the new version, probably to close the application, install the new version (if it does not require you to remove the old version first, and in many cases even reboot the entire system.
Why can’t you update yourself in the background without annoying me?
I’m wondering if there are any good user experience designers for software – I bet none of them considered that by not doing the update in the background (with zero user intervention) the software maintenance can became a full-time job.
I know that this problem is Windows and OS X specific because on Linux the package managers can to the job very well and only people with limited brain usage would not use them to deploy their products. I’m sure that Microsoft and Apple considered opening their updaters but some people at them considered that it would break their monopoly and it’s ‘better’ to keep this only for them.
This post is not about complaining is more about taking action. What can we do about this? We can complain to each software developer, creating a bug, voting for it or posting an email on their forum. If they will see the how much people are complaining about this they will probably take action.
So I created a list with products failing to comply with this and with links to the bugs so you could express your opinion. In case you are a software developer and you are interested in adding this feature to your product you could take a look at there two projects made open-source by Google: Update Engine (OS X) and Google Update / Omaha (Windows).
Whitelist
Currently I did not find any Windows software that is able to update silently.
Blacklist
The below list contains links to bugs where you can vote or to the mailing list or forums where you can post a feature request.
* Firefox 446342, 489138
* TortoiseSVN – forum – the bug tracker is read-only
* Pidgin
English
I for one don’t want software to silently update itself. It should, at least, give the user a choice of skipping updates. There’s also a bandwidth issue: if your traffic is being metered (e.g. if you use a mobile connection) you might not want applications to suddenly start downloading updates by themselves.