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Internet Users Not Updating Browser
Jackson writes "Security researchers from ETH Zurich, Google, and IBM Internet Security Systems have shown that more than 600 million Internet users don't use the latest version of their browser. The researchers' paper, shows that as of June 2008, only 59.1 percent of Internet users worldwide use the latest major version of their preferred web browser.
Suggestions have also been made to inform users that their browser is out of date."
There's a reason people stick to IE6.
It's called IE7.
No, I'm not making a joke. IE7 brings with it all the dubious "improvements" to the user interface that Microsoft came up with for Vista.
And that's the low-hanging fruit. That's the browser that most needs to be updated. The rest are almost lost in the noise, because thanks to ActiveX and browser integration and "(in)security zones" you're better off with a three year old version of any other browser than even the latest version of Internet Explorer.
The best thing that Microsoft could do to get people to update would be to roll back the "Vista Theme", or make it optional. In Vista, too, for that matter.
You better not be the bastard who keeps crashing our server becuase they decided that FF3 was a better idea than IE, even though it crashed the server every time FF is used to access the web-based application, the one bough from a third party that has been rolled out internally on our systems, used globally by hundreds of users, and won't get this bug fixed for months.
So no, no need to thank you at all.
Stupid goddamn users.
I'm a concientious
Suggestions have also been made to inform users that their browser is out of date.
Why? I know I run an out-of-date browser (FF1.5), and just don't care. For that matter, it annoyed me when FF tried to update itself (and refused to take "no" for an answer), to the point that I blocked its update site in my hosts file.
The computer industry (and I say this as part of it) has a disease - We insist on always having the latest-and-greatest version of everything, despite already having something "good enough". Now, I'll lead the pack in bitching about stupid or stubborn users, but in this case, I can certainly sympathize with them... Stop forcing updates on us that have no (apparent) use except making a higher number appear in the "about" dialog.
Of course, if a really impressive new feature appears, I'll gladly upgrade to get it; But in the browser world, we haven't seen any really useful new features in a looooooong time.