Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Really, I wasn't aware that that many projects used bsdiff.


Firefox, FreeBSD, OS X, Courgette (it preprocesses binaries and then feeds them to bsdiff), Sophos, Mochi Media, the Amazon Kindle...


Yeah, me neither. What projects are we talking about here? I'm in Linux so I'm getting the full deb each time. I'm okay with that considering it's managed for me. I'll take that any day.

Adobe? Apple? Those are the two vendors that I can imagine people having installed on most, if not all Windows computers. And I know for a fact they both distribute updates as full copies of their software waying in at a couple hundred to several hundred megabytes, requiring manual updates, pop up windows and restarts.

I've yet to see anyone do updates as fast or seamlessly as Google.


Firefox has long used bsdiff to distribute both security updates and major release updates:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Software_Update:MAR

While Firefox updates in the past were not as quiet or seamless as Chrome updates, Mozilla is moving in that direction as part of the new "rapid release" process:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease


yum-presto on Fedora uses deltarpm, which uses bsdiff.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: