How effective was that treatment, I don’t know. (It definitely felt more thought through than the trash where the skeuomorphism undermined the function itself.) But it is all interesting to me in the larger context of the tensions underlying updates:

  • It’s in a company’s best interest for every user to be on the latest version, since that saves on support headaches.
  • A company needs to believe the newest version is the best ever – even if it’s not – similarly as our brains need to believe we are generally right most of the time, just so we can function.

That’s why I always appreciate the improvements that prioritize the user experience over the company’s.

Source: “Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least convenient time.”

I think there are other hidden benefits to this too:

  • It built a habit that a restart is all it needed to be on the latest, most secure version and it made the “restart” as simple as - top right -> click
  • It built a habit for the user to check that area in the future. Although with scale, we also realized that most users prefer just closing and opening the browser and it just happens
  • Chrome’s story is fascinating because the first thing built was the autoupdate mechanism. It was called Omaha (for Windows) and Keystone (for Mac).

Once again, because of scale - Chrome tends to at least bring these various systems under one umbrella. For example, in mediastack - after maintaining a different media stack for Chrome OS, Linux, Mac, Windows, Android, we decided to unify it all together for better security, rollouts and improved performance.

Similarly, I believe Omaha 4 is now what’s used across the operating systems aka the chromium updater.

Btw, the new update type that Red Sweater Software is highlighting is already used by ghostty. It’s actually quite the delightful little button. I’ve also noticed it being adopted by both codex and antigravity 2 applications.