Opera 22 gets silent background updates
When you analyze how popular browser companies deliver updates to end user systems, you will notice that most use the Task Scheduler on Windows for that.
This is the case for Google Chrome and Firefox, and now also for the Opera web browser.
Opera Software has released a new version of Opera 22, currently available in the developer channel, that ships with this new auto-updating feature included.
As you may recall, Opera previously performed checks occasionally while the program was running and that may have triggered UAC prompts on the operating system.
If you have updated or installed Opera 22 on Windows, you automatically benefit from the new updating option. The scheduled task runs on system startup initially to check for updates automatically.
Opera notes that it can adjust the frequency of checks to reduce the load on company servers if the need should arise to do that.
When Opera is running, it will check to see if the task is running, and if that is not the case, attempt to run it manually instead. If that fails, the browser will drop back to its own update checker to check for and download updates to the system.
When you open the Task Manager, you find two triggers configured for Opera's scheduled Autoupdate feature. The first runs on system start, the second every day on 9:03. Note that the time may vary, as it was set to the time of installing the latest version of the browser on the test PC.
You can adjust the values here easily with a double-click on the trigger that you want to modify. This opens an edit window where you can modify the time and other parameters. Here it is for instance possible to run the task weekly only, or multiple times a day if you want that.
Triggers can also be disabled here in case you only want one to be used and not both.
When the task runs, launcher.exe from the Opera directory will be run with the --scheduledautoupdate parameter.
Silent updates are however not the only improvement when it comes to updates. The company notes that it will send updates as packages whenever possible to reduce the Megabytes that users have to download to update the browsr.
Previously, you always had to download the full version of Opera to update the browser. Now, when possible, you only download the changed bits so to speak and the browser attempts to install the patch this way. If that fails for whatever reason, the full update will be downloaded and used instead.
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Nice
shady
slim?
No? No it’s not.
It’s not an “option” it’s a mandatory stealth addition therefore it’s shady.
No it’s not. There’s nothing shady about having the option to enable background updates. If you don’t like it, turn it off.
yes it is.