Automatic updates not working

[Elbart]

It's so weird. For years people (read: XP-users) had no "problem" updating software because their accounts had admin-rights - a security-nightmare. Now, with Vista onwards, all big three OS finally had proper and dumb-user-managable user-permission-management, so you need admin-rights to update/install programs. What are the devs doing? Circumventing these security-measures with changing permissions of the program folder (i.e. Steam comes to mind), resident services with admin-rights which stay idle for 6 weeks (what apparently Mozilla are planning) or installing the programs(!) in user-directories(!!) (Chrome).

I don't get it.

[michaell522]

It's so weird. For years people (read: XP-users) had no "problem" updating software because their accounts had admin-rights - a security-nightmare. Now, with Vista onwards, all big three OS finally had proper and dumb-user-managable user-permission-management, so you need admin-rights to update/install programs. What are the devs doing? Circumventing these security-measures with changing permissions of the program folder (i.e. Steam comes to mind), resident services with admin-rights which stay idle for 6 weeks (what apparently Mozilla are planning) or installing the programs(!) in user-directories(!!) (Chrome).

Well, of those three options, I think I agree that Mozilla's choice is the least worst - at least that one means you need admin rights to install the updater service, and the software is thereafter installed with admin rights, rather than the other options which mean the software is installed with user rights. (And in Mozilla's case, it will be optional - you can not have the service and get prompted to install each update, like now.)

I don't get it.

I would think the reasoning for why XP didn't have the "proper" security model and lots of software is now avoiding it is quite obvious. It's not necessarily that users are dumb, it's that they don't want to be bothered with doing admin stuff, and they don't perceive much risk in not doing it. If it's any effort at all to update, they won't do it. So from the point of view of software-makers, if they make things easier for those users, more people have updated software (and people may choose the easy software over the software that makes them do admin stuff).

Would be nice if there was one updater service which could do different software, but that means someone taking responsibility for other people's software, and at least Microsoft said that they don't want to do that...

[KWierso]

Would be nice if there was one updater service which could do different software, but that means someone taking responsibility for other people's software, and at least Microsoft said that they don't want to do that...

Though with the new Windows Store in Win8, there might be a centrally managed option for some software.