Firefox will use Microsoft BITS technology to provide updates for all users
The engineers of Mozilla have revealed that Firefox is preparing to use Microsoft’s background intelligent transmission technology, BITS to provide users with update services. The background intelligent transmission technology is a solution adopted by Microsoft to provide updates every day. It mainly detects the user’s network and then adopts a targeted update solution. For example, when a user with a slow network speed adopts the intelligent transmission technology, it is more convenient to download and update, and the download time of the user staying on the update page is reduced.
At the same time, the intelligent transmission technology will also transmit the installation package in conjunction with the dedicated proxy server of Firefox browser, and the update will not affect the performance when the user uses it.
Of course, it is essentially used to make it easier for users to update to the latest version. After all, many users are still using the old version of Firefox without updating. The above technology will be provided to the user from the next official version of Firefox browser, version 68, and the subsequent updates should find this change.
The idea was put forward some time ago, with Mozilla’s Matt Howell saying:
The Update Agent is being planned as a background process which will remain running after the browser is closed to download and apply updates. This should make updating more convenient for everyone and reduce the time to get new updates for users who aren’t well supported by the current update process because they don’t run Firefox very much and/or they have slow Internet connections.
More recently, Kirk Steuber explained that:
As a stepping stone towards releasing the update agent, we are going to first allow Firefox to update using BITS without the update agent. This will allow us to more easily transition from one download mechanism to the other rather than just dropping it in all at once. For now, Firefox will call out to BITS via an interface built in to the binary. This interface will, for now, communicate with BITS directly, but will be designed such that in the future it can communicate with BITS using the Update Agent as an intermediary. This will allow it to manage BITS jobs as the Local Service user, which is how we want downloads to occur when the Update Agent downloads them independently.
Via: Techdows
