Silent Updates – Only Half of the Solution

Just a very quick tip.

A while back I wrote about the auto update capabilities of three major browsers but there is one very important thing to remember despite the convenience of having automatic updates applied to software including browsers and operating systems.

In order for your software to make use of the update automatically applied it will normally need to be restarted. Sometimes, this is not a big deal if you don’t rely upon it heavily but for things like web browsers it can be a bit of a hassle to have many tens of tabs reopened or even lost if your browser doesn’t do a good job of remembering them in between sessions. This is where the monthly reboot for Windows Update comes in handy as it does force you to close all your other software down but nonetheless it can still be a pain.

Anyway, silent updates are convenient, non-intrusive and help get patches on to systems that require them as soon as possible but they either completely remove the nag to restart or reduce it to a very tiny visual prompt (such as how Google Chrome displays a little indicator on the wrench icon up the top right of the browser window). Particularly with web browsers being a prime target for security exploits these days it does beg the question as to whether or not users should be prompted to restart the software to activate the latest patches.

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