[mananaysiempre]

> Shouldn't browsers update themselves these days?

Looking over the shoulder of a user who’s fairly savvy—but doesn’t understand just how horrifying browser security is—revealed at least one pitfall to me: an update needs a restart of the browser, and a prompt to restart appears specifically when the user turns to the browser, presumably, in order to use it, that is, at the worst possible moment. As a result, it gets postponed indefinitely.

(Forced restarts when the browser thinks you’re not using it are also a bad idea for reasons that are hopefully obvious to anybody who’s used a modern version of Windows. That is not even counting the general vibe of knowing better than the user what they want, which I just instinctively dislike.)

[rtpg]

Just like Chrome had a whole thing about process isolation to avoid crashing the entire system, it would be quite excellent if they could figure out how to effectively update at a tab-based level. New tab? Get the newest Chrome in the tab.

Obviously would be quite frustrating to debug a thing only to realize tab A is version 1 and tab B is version 2 of course. And it seems like it would require a massive amount of effort. Would be cool though!

[smallnix]

Doesn't chrome also put tabs into "standby" (i.e. kill them) by default? Then this would update most tabs for most users.

[jokethrowaway]

Why not update all tabs at once then?

The key feature would be to maintain the exact state of a tab between process restarts.

Then they could restart the whole browser without the user noticing