Microsoft and Mozilla plan new upgrade tactics for Edge and Firefox
Microsoft and Mozilla have outlined the steps they plan to take to streamline the process of upgrading their browsers, Edge and Firefox, respectively.
In March, Microsoft announced that it would change the way the company updatsd Edge, noting that the current method, which relied on a utility best known for keeping Office apps up to date on Mac, would be given a maintenance package specific to the Mac. Navigator.
“He will be solely responsible for updating the products related to Edge and will not be affected (eg blocked) by other pending product updates,” Olivia Zhang, program manager wrote in a March 10 publication on a corporate blog. “Updates will occur automatically and silently, and no out-of-board notifications will be displayed.”
On unmanaged PCs – those not under the control of an IT administrator – Microsoft now upgrades Edge from one version to another using a tool called Microsoft AutoUpdate, long used to service macOS Office applications such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. (On Windows devices, Edge is served by Windows Update, like all Microsoft products.)
The edge-to-edge transition – a process that will accelerate at a rate every four weeks this fall – will also be a little more graceful. âWhen you restart the browser when an update is available, your browser will instantly restart with the updated version rather than waiting for the update to be applied,â Zhang said. Gone is the delay in which the user watches the download occur before a restart is possible.
Edge enterprise users, said Zhang, would not see the new upgrade behavior; nor Windows users of the browser. In other words, current processes in managed environments will continue to receive all Edge updates through established IT channels, such as Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), Windows Update for Business (WUfB), and Intune and Configuration Manager. of Endpoint Manager.
Microsoft did not specify when the new Mac update scheme would be released to the public in the production-quality version of Edge, referred to as Stable. When Zhang wrote his post, the feature had been added to Edge Dev, version 91. As of May 5, the new upgrade process was included in Edge Dev, version 92 (but not the more stable version of Edge Beta, version 91).
At the end of the line? The first Edge upgrade process that could reach Macs would be version 92, which is slated to debut on July 22.
Mozilla also has new projects for Firefox
Most recently, Mozilla introduced a new background update process for Firefox. In an April post on the Browser Development Forum, Nick Alexander, a software engineer, described the new mechanism added to the Nightly build channel for Windows.
“Updates when Firefox is not running work as follows: Default Firefox profile … will schedule operating system level tasks that run periodically [then] these tasks invoke Firefox in a stripped-down headless ‘background task mode’ that pumps up the update cycle before exiting, âAlexander wrote in the April 12 message.
ghacks.com previously reported on the next Firefox change.
Since Alexander’s initial message, the background update possesses been baked in Firefox Nightly.
Currently, Firefox updates only when the browser is running. Much like its rivals, including Chrome and Edge, Firefox checks for pending updates and upgrades when it launches, and even downloads them in the background. However, the update or upgrade is not installed until the next time you restart the browser. Users who leave applications open indefinitely or spend weeks between system restarts can then run an insecure version even if a patched edition is available and already on their computer.
Businesses will be able to turn off background updating using the BackgroundAppUpdate group policy.
According to Alexander, background upgrades will be included in Firefox 89, which is slated to debut in Stable on June 1.
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