Windows Needs a Unified Update Mechanism

Why doesn’t Windows (or Mac OS X, for that matter) provide a built-in service that third-party users can use to provide updates to their applications?

Currently, users are bewildered by a dizzying array of Not-Invented-Here update mechanisms. When I start Paint.NET (a program that I love and use often), it’ll irritatingly ask me to update as soon as I’ve started it. Adobe Acrobat will similarly pop up an insanely complex dialog at start up. Java has a process that sits there sucking up memory and displays a balloon in the system tray. Flash will display an owner-drawn dialog (that looks just like spyware, by the way) when I first log into my Windows session. And Apple will pop up its own updater dialog seemingly at random.

Then there are the processes that sit there in memory, sitting around twiddling their thumbs 99% of the time:

• GoogleUpdate.exe — Google Chrome’s updater
• jusched.exe — Java’s updater
• SoftwareUpdate.exe — Apple’s hog takes up 13 MB

This isn’t the individual developer’s fault. When it comes to pushing updates, you can either use a technology like ClickOnce (which is useful but in a very specific environment, namely deploying internal business applications), or you can roll your own solution.

This is stupid.

Windows and Microsoft Update finally got an integrated user interface in Windows Vista. It’s unremarkable, which is a good thing, because that means that I must not hate it. Imagine how wonderful it would be–both for the user experience and memory usage–if all applications could integrate with this same user interface. An MSI installer could register a URL that Windows could check for updates periodically. If updates are found, it could use the same BITS mechanism to unobtrusively download it in the background. And to verify integrity, it would verify that the update has been signed by the same key that was used to sign the original installation MSI, or it could be based on some sort of other trust mechanism. This way, all of the user’s updates would be accessible through one interface.

To make sure companies use it, make it a requirement for the Windows Logo program.

Why hasn’t this happened yet?