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by mduggles
1040 days ago
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On Windows it isn't possible to remove or rename files and directories that are being used. In order to handle this, you typically have to run some sort of helper application outside of the installation directory. This renames the existing installation directory to a new directory with ".tmp" (often, not always, but this is my guess). If that rename operation fails in the middle of the operation because a file being opened, either by another process or sometimes by an add-on, then the background update fails. On Mac and Linux it's less complicated which is why they never get the "download the new version" prompt, but Chrome and Firefox have evolved systems for managing how these silent updates work. On Chrome the update button you talk talking about means you haven't closed the browser in awhile. If you see green that means an update has been available for 2 days, orange – 4 days and red – 7 or more days. My guess is that you are encountering a situation in which the Chrome background helper can't successfully run the update process and then asks you to download the whole thing again so they don't need to rely on the updater and can just move your user files over. |
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Firefox on Windows gives me a pop-up indicating a new version is available for download and providing a button to do that now. A restart is still required to get the new version, but AFAIK there's no default visible prompt to indicate the need to restart. If I go to Help -> About Firefox, that tells me I should restart to update...but that's not terribly obvious.
I turn on Linux and Windows machines after 3-6 months of inactivity somewhat often and never hit the issues OP describes, so I feel they are either misinterpreting what they / their relatives are seeing or they have performed other changes to these systems that block the standard behaviors.