Yesterday, I was installing F.lux on my Mac (cool-looking program by the way), and when I ran it, it asked me if I wanted the program to automatically update. How am I (or any average user) supposed to make that decision, before I have a chance to use the program?
I would imagine that most users just want to use the thing, and don't care about updating, so the programmers could pick some choice and make it the default (either update or don't update). Even users who do care about updating would not be able to make a reasonable decision.
I am not specifically picking on F.lux. I have seen many programs do this same thing and I don't see why. My question is this: What advantage is there, if any, in making the user choose whether to enable auto-updating before (s)he has a chance to use the program, over making the choice just another option in the preferences dialog that can be enabled or disabled at any time?