In the old launcher, the game would autoupdate to the latest major release when launched. When the first version of the new launcher was released, they removed this feature, replacing it with a list of all versions to chose from. With the release of the latest version of the new launcher, they replaced that with a list of profiles that can be set use any specific version of minecraft, or the latest version. However, the option to update to the latest version also includes snapshots, so it is not the same thing. The way I would expect most players would want the launcher to function most of the time is just to update their minecraft to the latest major release, then launch it, and this seems to have been unintentionally removed with the new launcher.
(just to be clear, what I mean by "major release" is anything that is not a snapshot, whether or not that is what the word is supposed to mean)
Comments 5
how is this working as intended? they never (as far as I know) announced they would remove the ability to auto-update the game, and have added in a similar feature that works slightly differently and not in the way that most players would expect it to. If you set the version of a profile to "(latest version)," then it will use the latest snapshot, not the latest version, as one would expect it to.
As Dinnerbone put it:
It will be once we have 1.6 released
Right now the launcher is here for snapshots (pre-release counts as one)
So it would be silly to not default to allowing snapshots
But when it is actually for releases, it will default to those.
This is currently working as intended and is a planned feature when made public.