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.

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)

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

> 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.

I hadn't seen your tools before, and they're really nice. I would definitely be using them were it not for the fact that my clients have locked down environments that do not have internet connections.

Do you support enterprise distribution servers so that clients could host a server where updates were collected and then they could centrally select which machines got the updates (i.e. Dev today, Test in 2 weeks, Prod after 3 months)?

Unfortunately we do not, yet. It's on our short list of features to-do.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

Exactly as often as the buy a new computer.