How to automatically upgrade a Firebreath plugin

Question

Recently, I wrote a cross-browser plugin using Firebreath, and I made one installer for all browsers. I searched in stackoverflow for automatic plugin installation, and find

Answer 1

Basically there is no good answer to your question, unfortunately. I have had in-place updates working for all browsers (updating in the browser without a restart), but it's fraught with difficulty and extremely fragile. I don't really recommend it.

Probably the cleanest update experience I've seen is by using Google Omaha to do the install and automatic updates in the background. The biggest downside to Omaha is that it's a beast to get set up and working; even just building it requires a lot of work, and then you have to customize a lot of constants and such.

The way I do it is just require that the user download and install an update (MSI or .DMG w/ applescript, depending on the platform) and then just tell them they'll have to restart their browser to get the new version. It's not clean, but it drastically reduces the support requirements.