Study: Lots of People Use Dangerously Out-of-Date Browsers

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July 1, 2008

Study: Lots of People Use Dangerously Out-of-Date Browsers

This story is all over today:

A study out of Switzerland indicates that just under 60 percent of browsers in use are up to date.

“What the researchers found is that although software vendors provide patches for security problems, it can take days, weeks or months before people update their applications. In the meantime, those users are at risk.

“But it’s not entirely the fault of users, since Web browser vendors haven’t exactly made patching easy, said Stefan Frei, a doctoral student at the institute, which is known as ETH Zurich, and one of the report’s authors. The Web browser is still fairly young technology, and the industry has yet to settle on a dominant, well-tested design, he said.”

Unsurprisingly, Firefox users fare pretty well in terms of how quickly they’re updated to a new version thanks to automatic background updating.

The study found that, in terms of the proportion of the user base running the latest version, Safari came in second, Opera third, and IE fourth.

I guess I’m running an out-of-date Safari as of today: Leopard.4 arrived yesterday, including an updated Safari, but I’ve only installed it on a Macbook in the house. Nothing broke, so I mean to go ahead and install it on the main machine this afternoon on my way out the door.

I don’t like to install any big update right away, and since I’ve started using Macs I’ve been even less eager. When everything arrives in a big lump, backing out of one problematic patch is hard. The fact that 10.5.4 is arriving in time for the 3G iPhone launch made me even more leery. They got it out in plenty of time, which doesn’t suggest launch-date-driven hurrying, but it still seemed best to let sites like MacUpdate serve as canaries in the coal mine.

Oh … I’ve also got eeebuntu running on my eeePC. It feels like I haven’t been able to use it from day to day in the last week without getting pestered about some update or another. I usually let it do its thing, though. The package management system is easy enough to understand if a single package turns out to be screwed up.

I was a Debian user before there was a “testing” branch and I got caught up in a broken Perl package that crippled “unstable” users. That, in turn, broke big chunks of the package management system itself, but it was still pretty easy to back out of it and get back on track.

(Link)