I've had a quick look at the article (I'm running Firefox 11 under Ubuntu 11.10). The change is to do with a change in their release schedule. New releases of Firefox are being planned for 6 week intervals and the silent updates feature is to minimize interruption to users work as the updates are installed. (There will be some kind of Extended Support release for longer term stability in organizations, similar in concert to Ubuntu LTS releases I imagine). It's also not clear from what I've read what will happen if you want to run earlier versions; it probably says somewhere, but not in the bits I read. (They also claim v11 is up to 7 times faster than v3.6 and memory usage in v11 was reduced by 50%. So you'd need a good reason to go that far back!).

The feature is described in more detail here: Silent Update. A quick summary is:

1) There will be no user dialog for the update (it's not clear if you'll be able to turn off updates completely).

2) Update will be in background and (I think) is going to happen when you shut Firefox and before the next restart.

3) Add-on compatibility checks (which generally cause a pause when Firefox restarts after an update) will be modified; I think they will be assumed to be compatible unless they are definitely known not to be or are blacklisted. If they are used later and found to be incompatible a user dialog will appear then.

4) The What's New tab will not appear so frequently and may be moved somewhere else, possibly Tools menu.

5) In Win7 and Vista UAC they are looking to bypass the dialogs ie you won't be prompted to permit continuation.

6) The changes are planned to be introduced from v12 (maybe staged).



I don't think I have any problems with these changes.

As regards blocking the updates in firewall I imagine you'd have to find out how the updates are being done and either block the updating service or ports it might be using.

The changes will affect all platforms (though obviously with a few minor changes of detail).


Mick