Are there any standard one-click install/lauch mechanisms for the web?

Question

The reason I ask is mostly due to how Google Chrome installation works once you click the "Accept and install" button from Firefox. After you click the installation is started directly and when it's completed Chrome itself starts up.

Firefox does not show any "Save" or "Confirm" dialogs after you click the Install button (on Chrome install web page).

Now, is this standard behaviour? Or might it be due to having an old version of Chrome already on the computer (Note: The new version was still installed from Firefox).

Seems a bit risky to me, all you have to do is fool the user to click something and then you can do whatever you want on his machine, or? Personally I thought things like this only worked with IE/ActiveX.

Answer 1

(speculative) I suspect the old installation or rather its updater took over at that point. As for the risk: If the Chrome guys did their homework (and I suspect they have), then Chrome will check for signatures on the file, etc. before running anything. That's standard behavior for updaters (sane ones, at least) and prevents abuse at that point.

Answer 2

Google's updater is standard and open source, (called Omaha) but there are no open source server implementations as yet. It can be found here.

The way I understand it working is that when you download a file you trigger the updater with an ID and it takes care of the installation and maintenance of the program.

Answer 3

This is absolutely not standard behaviour. It looks like it is some kind of extension in Firefox. This will not work in Opera, IE or Safari. For those they might use different methods. For IE maybe ActiveX. The rest just downloads a small setup file.

Microsoft has a propritary solution which is always included in their development programs, called ClickOnce. It needs .NET Framework. .NET Framework installs a Firefox extension for ClickOnce, and for everything else you can just run the setup.exe.

Answer 4

Looking at the code of the chrome download page, they seem to be using three mechanisms:

• Standard download
• OneClick (using the google updater plugin)
• ClickOnce (using the .NET Framework assistant plugin)

ClickOnce is widely available due to the pervasiveness of .NET 3.5 SP 1 (in which it is bundled).