Autoupdate extensions

paul_quixote This is not a problem but a missing feature. There are a lot missing features in Orion because Orion is not a Chromium clone, but a browser built from scratch.

We prioritize bug fixes to new feature development. The problem is that there are close to 2000 open issues on this forum which prevents us from developing new features which will likely have more bugs, which is why is this getting posponed. The real problem is the size of the team - only 3 devs. Despite that we ship more features in each monthly release than most browsers do in a year. We are all ears to hear how we should manage the priorities of the project differently given this context.

Vlad I would argue that this isn't a missing feature so much as a bug/flaw in an already implement feature: extension support. One that will lead to more and more unnecessary bug reports the longer it's left unaddressed. Or worse, people not reporting and just giving up on Orion.

When out of date extensions cause issues on websites the casual user will likely blame Orion because they have no way of knowing that their extensions aren't getting updated, whether they need updating, and have no obvious way to update them if they did know.

Vlad Auto updating extensions will likely lead to more bug reports as newer versions tend to include stuff we do not support yet. This is why some of the extensions in "Popular extensions" refer older versions of the extension (eg Metamask and Grammarly) as those work, but newer do not.

That's why Orion needs to add functionality and UI elements for manual updates, not auto updates. I made a seperate ticket about this but it just got merged into this one.

Vlad Since updating extensions is already possible (just not in automated way) and there were so many actual bugs we prioritized the bugs.

As far as I can tell updating extensions is only possible by uninstalling and reinstalling. This is terrible because you lose all your settings in the process. For example, I use Dark Reader in whitelist mode. Every time I update it I lose my list of whitelisted sites. I also use extensions like Scratch Addons and FB Purity which have literally hundreds of settings. All lost when uninstalling and reinstalling. And an add-on like FB Purity has to be kept up to date because Facebook is constantly changing.

Here's what I requested in my original post (merged into this thread), which is not the same as auto-updates:

Xyth In the Extensions Panel there are Reload, Settings and Uninstall buttons. There needs to be a "Check for Update" button as well, that becomes a "Update to Version x.xx" button if a new version of the extension is detected.

Additionally, clicking on the name of an extension in the Extension panel should open that extension's page in a new tab.

Anatomy5803 The engineering challange is that the most issues on this forum, and there are over 2,000 open ones, are bugs. There is huge pressure to fix those bugs, which you might get a sense of if you just read the first 50 posts when you open the home page (I dare you do that! .

So between fixing many small bugs and spending considerable time to introduce a new feature (which will probably bring more bugs) we simply prioritize fixing many bugs, at least as long the backlog contains 2000+ open issues.

Presenting automatic extension updates. Landing in RC tomorrow.