Firefox Users Stay Ahead On the Update Curve 328
Reader Alex links to news of a study comparing the currency and patch level of various Web browsers, excerpting:
"Firefox users were far and away the most likely to use the latest version, with an overwhelming 83.3 percent running an updated browser on any given day. However, despite Firefox's single click integrate auto-update functionality, 16.7 percent of Firefox users still continue to access the Web with an outdated version of the browser, researchers said. The study also revealed that the majority of Safari users (65.3) percent were likely to use the latest version of the browser between December 2007 and June 2008, after Safari version 3 became available. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Internet Explorer users ranked last in terms of safe browsing. Between January 2007 and June 2008, less than half of IE users — 47.6 percent — were running the most secure browser version during the same time period."
Understandable (Score:5, Insightful)
the reason (Score:5, Insightful)
The majority of IE users use IE "because it's there." These people see no reason to download a different browser because one is already provided for them. These are the same people that usually end up relying on Automatic Updates to secure their browser, in most cases not even aware that these updates were taking place to begin with. Chances are that these people don't know that their browser even has updates, much less that they are running an insecure, outdated browser.
Users of alternative browsers, by contrast, use their browser deliberately. They know that IE is there, but they blatantly decide to go against the tide and use something else. Whatever the reason for this depends on the user, but most of them share this common trait. Said browsers can't use Automatic Updates, so they must have their own update checking mechanisms in place. Every alternative browser I've used will check every so often for an update and display a pop-up for the user. The user then knows that their browser is out-of-date. Such users also tend to want the latest version, again for various reasons. Firefox is a bit more aggressive that most, downloading the update by default and installing it regardless of whether the user chooses to have it done now or later, which better explains its higher percentage.
Re:Usual drivel (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, wait.
Re:Usual drivel (Score:1, Insightful)
for me the reason is not the need to reboot but the constant nagging reminding me every five minutes that i need to restart my machine. I f*ing know! a tray icon with a warning sign is good enough. I will do it as soon as i am done with what i am doing. If they don't believe that turning off reminder is a good idea at least let me change the reminder frequency.
Aren't I the living satan (Score:3, Insightful)
Well I still use version 1.5.0.12. Just minimize those annoying upgrade popups every time they pop up. 10 clicks & they just give an error & next day it's another popup for another upgrade. You mean those weren't advertizements? Well, probably just destroyed someone's TimeWarner stock.
easiest to update means it gets updated (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention Apple sneaking in Safari with an iTunes critical update and many programs having regressions in updates.
Can we trust Apple not to issue a firmware update that makes the iPod stop working with 3rd party media players?
I myself keep everything updated (as much as Ubuntu repos let me anyway). But things like kernel updates force my to recompile my wifi driver so I can understand how people don't upgrade.
Re:*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
No reason to fix what isn't broke.
Oh it's broke. You just don't know.
User group (Score:3, Insightful)
Old Firefox usage (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how much of the old Firefox usage is old installs in Linux? You can't use the built-in updater if you installed the RPM/DEB because the permissions are (or should be) wrong for letting you write to the folder. AFAIK there's only a few distros who have moved to Firefox 3 so far, so the rest would be showing up as out-dated.
Similarly for Windows, if they're counting Firefox 3 as "up to date" then how many people are still on old v2s because they don't know about v3?
Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who uses linux should know this.
For example, wine v0.9.58 works perfectly for me; I blindly updated to
Usually, updates are a good thing, but not always.
The Camino folks have it just right (Score:2, Insightful)
I use Camino [caminobrowser.org] as my browser on my Mac and choose to leave the home page as the default "Camino Start" page. Its very minimalist, just shows a small Google search box, and a link to the latest version which changes colour to red if my version is outdated.
No in-your-face messages, no irritating popups, no external syncing software... though I guess it only works if you keep it as your home page. Makes sense to use a feature that's built into every web browser (sarcasm aside): the ability to load a web page!
Re:Usual drivel (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Usual drivel (Score:3, Insightful)
How am I suppose to tell grandma to do that.. frankly if you need a command line to do that it's not ready for desktop.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
You're approaching this too much from a geek's perspective. Updating "the system" is too esoteric for the majority of users. If the user has to be bothered with such a concept as a package manager, it's bad UI.
Anyway, microsoft has a package manager, somewhat, and they have a consistent auto-update system that takes care of dependancies. And yet half of IE users use an old version.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Many Problems With Methodology In This Study (Score:3, Insightful)
(Warning: Self-promotion)
In my eWEEK column on this study [eweek.com] I point out numerous problems with it. Many have been mentioned by others.
The main issue is that the study is based on user-agent string data from Google's logs, and Microsoft does not supply minor version information in that string, unlike Firefox, Safari and others. Microsoft considers this to be an "information disclosure vulnerability" because it would help an attacker to commit version-specific attacks.
Because of this, the authors only know about IE major versions (5, 6. 7, 8) and decided that all IE7 users were secure, while nobody else was. Microsoft is still providing security updates for IE5 and IE6; while they are not as secure as IE7 for a variety of reasons, it's not reasonable to lump them into a group with people who don't update their browser. Conversely, if you have IE7 and haven't applied any of the security updates to it, the study says you're up to date.
Be that as it may, as others have said, the issue here is that business users use IE and the other browsers have minimal footprint in it. Firefox, by default, has no support for managed updates, and IT in a big company would (make that should) never allow users to apply updates willy-nilly to their systems. Another point is that while Microsoft supports old version for years, at the demand of their customers, Mozilla withdraws all support for old versions within 6 months of a new one being released. In fact, support for Firefox 2 will end in December of this year. Businesses won't tolerate this. IE5 support on Windows 2000 will continue till 2010 and IE6 as late as 2015.
Re:Usual drivel (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlikely, anybody knowledgeable enough to not be running an admin account in Windows is knowledgeable enough to know when a new version is out.
I suppose it's possible, but considering the many applications that don't work right as a non-admin user, I'd be surprised if those people were the ones not updating.
Re:Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet half of IE users use an old version.
Yes, but I'm sure that a lot of them prefer IE 6 to IE 7. For me IE 6 was good, rendered pages rather quickly, had a decent looking UI, sure it didn't have tabs, but that wasn't a big deal for me. I had seen IE 7 on another person's computer and I decided not to upgrade to it, it's UI was ugly and it seemed to be a bloated version of IE 6, sure it was more secure but really, when running a Windows box, security isn't that big of a deal. I later wiped the HD and installed Ubuntu.
Re:Trust (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Usual drivel (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the Windows XP way is to run "Computer Management", then go to "Services" and stop the appropriate service. Computer Management is found inside Administrative Tools, which by default appears in Control Panel. You can also make it appear in other locations. No idea where they put it in Vista, but it makes actual logical sense in Windows XP. I'm not really sure what they were thinking, changing the XP GUI layout so much.
Microsoft is way way WAY behind the curve on basically everything but market position, but boy did they get XP right (for a very Microsoftian value of "right".)
Newest MSIE not available to everybody (Score:2, Insightful)