How quickly do users actually upgrade their browsers? It’s a question that seems to come up frequently and is definitely on the minds of developers who want to know when they’ll be able to leverage the best features for their apps. Overall, I think the major browser makers try to share important usage information but the this specific data isn’t reported often enough. It was great to see that Pingdom did their own analysis of the issue and even offered a comparison of the upgrade mechanisms used by the browser makers.
From the report, it shows that Google’s Chrome has by far the fastest upgrade time of all the browsers, generally converting users within a month of a new release. This is very impressive and primarily due to the browser’s use of automatic updating.
Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple & Opera all take a milder approach with Mozilla being slightly more direct using user prompts that try to explain the benefits of upgrading instead of forcing them to.
It’s certainly a balancing act between keep users up-to-date and allowing users to have a choice. What do you feel is the best update solution?
