Firefox adds silent updates in latest release, Firefox 15

The days of Firefox "talking" to you while updating are over. With the release of Firefox 15 today, Mozilla has done away with that form of updates, opting for the silent updates, or background updates, utilized by Chrome and other software. No longer will you have to wait while it updates to the latest version! What a relief.

All joking aside, this really is a nice feature to have in software. One of the most frustrating things I have encountered in computing is when I really need to look up something quickly and the browser is updating to the latest version. Since the updater is an integral part of the software, Mozilla took its time testing this before releasing it.

"This was one of the scariest projects that I've ever worked on, since messing something up in the updater component could have catastrophic consequences in case it prevents users from being able to update to newer Firefox revisions," said Ehsan Akhgari, a programmer who worked on the project.

The feature has been present in the nightly Firefox build for a while now, and using that, they caught a few bugs which were fixed in time for the release of Firefox 15. The latest version of Firefox is available from the Mozilla website. If you already have it installed, this should be the last update you have to endure.