I'd been meaning to rename update=false to stale=ok for a while. The feature is very limited. When a view is called with stale=ok, if there is currently an in-memory pointer to a completed view index, that will be preferred over updating the view to ensure that it reflects all database updates through the current sequence number. The effect is slightly lower latency, in the majority of cases.
However, if the view is not yet built, or has not been queried since the last time CouchDB was booted, sending stale=ok as a query parameter will have no effect. As such, I think update=false is a misleading name, and stale=ok is more indicative of the advisory nature of this param. This change was committed today in revision 736837 -- Chris Anderson http://jchris.mfdz.com
