14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla's switch to the rapid release cycle, which sees a new firefox come out every six weeks, has been a rather rough one. By now, most users have adapted to it, there's been no massive decrease in Firefox users and the latest versions usually become the most popular soon after they are released.
But there are still snags and there are still people left behind, or staying behind, with each new release.
Mozilla, understandably, is working on several ways of improving that to make sure that most users do make the jump to the latest Firefox release as soon as it becomes available.
Add-ons compatible by default
One way it's doing that is by marking Firefox add-ons compatible by default. Only the add-ons that are tested and found not to be compatible will be marked as such when a new Firefox comes out.
This should ensure that most people don't have a good reason to stop updates. This feature is already available in Firefox 10.
That said, one way of making sure that people upgrade is to make the process completely invisible. More users will upgrade if they don't even know it's happening.
That's Mozilla's purpose with the "silent updates" project it's working on. There are several features and improvements that are part of this project. They all work towards the goal of completely silent and automated updates and they're in various stages of implementation.
Background updates
One thing that Mozilla is working on is background updates. Currently, new versions are installed before Firefox starts, proving to be annoying for users who just want to get to their browser.
In the future, updates will be installed in the background while the browser is running and applied when the browser is restarted. This will happen in the next couple of releases if things go smoothly.
Nag screen after 24 hours, not 12
Another small but important tweak is to push the update notification back to 24 hours rather than the current 12. Now, when a new version is available and downloaded, the browser will nag users to install it if they don't restart the browser for 12 hours.
This screen has now been moved back to show up 24 hours after the update is received. 99 percent of Firefox users restart their browser in that time, meaning that 99 percent of Firefox users will never see that nag screen.
No more UAC dialogs in Windows
Another improvement is the removal of the UAC dialog in Windows. This dialog asks for user permission every time Firefox updates. It's an unnecessary nuisance and only helps to keep people from installing Firefox.
Starting with Firefox 12, the browser will install a small update service that will run to make sure that users only need to approve Firefox updates once.