Mozilla to counter “Update Fatigue” with Silent Updates

Mozilla’s Firefox has been the joke of 2011 when it comes to browsers, with its version changing almost every month and due to the way Firefox is updated that has meant users have had to make re-installs every couple of months to keep up to date. This is frustrating for two reasons, the first is the effort required to download and install and new version manually and the second is many add-ons seem to break when the version is updated. But Mozilla now seems to be taking a leaf out of Google’s book. For future updates it now plans to use a totally different method which it hopes will remove that update fatigue:

Mozilla wants to counter update fatigue with a two pronged approach. Firstly, it will change the way browser version numbers affect add-on compatibility. With Firefox 11, any add-on that’s compatible with Firefox 4+ will just run, without compatibility issues. Add-ons disabled by older versions of the browser will now resume working. Next up, Mozilla will introduce completely silent updates, which get downloaded in the background, and don’t notify you about restarting the browser to apply updates.

Sources: TheNextWeb Insider, Mozilla, TPU