

How fast do people upgrade to new browsers - edd
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/04/08/the-modern-browser-wars-how-well-firefox-ie-and-chrome-succeed-in-getting-their-users-to-upgrade/

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wyday
Someone from Google Switzerland wrote up a study on browser upgrades:
<http://www.techzoom.net/publications/silent-updates/index.en> . He came to
the same conclusion, namely that aggressive automatic-upgrades lead to faster
distribution of the stabler more secure versions.

Google seems to be taking a "website for the desktop" approach to the browser
upgrades. If Google updates their homepage, the user gets the new version the
next time they visit it. Ditto for their browser - the next time they start
Chrome it's upgraded seamlessly without bothering the user with the details.

We take the same approach as Google Chrome with our suite of updater tools
(<http://wyday.com/wybuild/> for anyone interested). We've found it's lead to
better input (less duplicate bug reports) and faster sales turnaround. We
haven't done a definitive study of our customers' customers, it'd be
interesting to see if they got the same results.

~~~
ErrantX
I like this in Chrome; the only thing I would prefer is that Dev build updates
were notified. It's a pain to suddenly have my favourite web pages crash on me
and have to work out if it is due to a recent upgrade or other unrelated issue
(so I can put in a bug report).

(the crashing doesn't worry me; that's what the dev build is for)

~~~
cdr
I think I agree. I don't mind even dev builds updating silently, but I would
really at least like a notification afterward.

~~~
ErrantX
> but I would really at least like a notification afterward.

oops, yeh that's what I meant. Some kind of notification bubble in the top
right with the update info.

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BrandonM
Automatic, unprompted upgrades are definitely the way to go in my opinion. For
any non-proficient user -- most of whom are taught to be wary of things like
viruses -- getting a popup window suggesting an upgrade is only a source of
confusion. I just got a call a couple days ago from a family member for this
exact situation when Firefox deemed it necessary to request permission to
update. The default behavior for the vast majority of desktop software should
be to attempt to check for (and automatically apply) an update upon
application startup.

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jhancock
Our new Chinese site stats for the first month (march 2010):

\- 18,000 sessions

\- 65,000 page views

\- IE 6 > 60%

The Chinese do not upgrade their systems. Part of the problem is the various
Microsoft approaches to piracy and blocking updates for pirate installs. Of
course, the root is that people aren't buying WinXP licenses, but that's
clearly not going to happen. So the bulk of Chinese PCs are virus laden IE6
machines.

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RyanMcGreal
I don't know how significant a factor it is, but on Linux distros where
Firefox comes through the package management system, there tends to be a lag
in upgrades.

I'm still running Ubuntu 9.04 at home and I had to break out of apt to get
past Firefox 3.0 (I ended up using Ubuntuzilla, which works surprisingly
well).

~~~
sapphirecat
For Ubuntu, quite a bit of software can be found in a PPA on Launchpad; for
Firefox it seems to be <https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/firefox-
stable/>

I haven't used that one myself, but the Chromium and Mercurial PPAs have
worked out quite well for me.

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nazgulnarsil
I switched to chrome only because firefox became unbearably slow over the last
2 major updates.

~~~
Batsu
Along these same lines, Firefox users have reason to stay behind on upgrades.
Speed is always a concern, but if an update breaks a critical extension (we
all know how much we love extensions) then... might as well stay behind.

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roundsquare
Exactly as often as the buy a new computer.

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BrandonM
I find it simultaneously sad and humorous that IE6 has more users than Chrome.

