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Comment by jaspero | Hacker News Reader

Firefox and Chrome would have the same fate, if they are as widely used as Windows/IE and comes default with an OS(Windows killer), like IE.

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Which fate? Slow release cycles, or apps written specifically for a single browser?

Fate as in, if Mozilla came up with a Windows-killer OS and all the Windows user moved to the new Mozilla OS. Than people will be stuck with FF 3.6, even after 10 years from now.

There is no evidence to support this assertion.

The new auto-upgrade model Mozilla has adopted for FF 4.0 (and that Chrome has had for ages) makes upgrade cycles, for all practical purposes, negligible.

Chrome 6.0 was released on September 2. Since then, Chrome 5.0's market share has dropped to nearly 0%, with Chrome 6.0 picking up all of 5.0's share while also absorbing a good amount of IE's share.

If Microsoft instituted an auto-upgrade path for IE and released updates with more regularity, this would slowly become a thing of the past.

In Enterprise Company there is no such thing as "Auto Upgrade"

I haven't tried it but can you upgrade those browsers without administrative rights? I am assuming you can't do it on corporate settings.

On Windows, if the user installs Chrome, it's installed into the user's home directory (local application data or something). This means the user does not need admin rights to either install or upgrade Chrome.

There are several ways to update programs on Windows without needing admin rights:

- You could do it as Chrome does and have a per-user install. I don't think Mozilla wants to do this.

- You could install a service or a scheduled task to do the work for you.

- MSI updates can be installed without admin rights if they're Authenticode signed, and Mozilla does have a valid Authenticode digital certificate.

Over half our Firefox traffic is still pre-3.6. Not IE6 bad, but it lacks CSS gradients and such.

This presupposes that a corporation doesn't turn this auto-upgrade feature off. Some companies like to have cut-throat control over their employees computers, despite known security benefits from the alternatives. "It's working now, so it's safer than upgrading and breaking our other stuff."

Around the time Firefox 3.0 came out, I dealt with a customer complaint that our web app was really slow. Their browser? Mozilla 1.7. No, not Firefox; Mozilla.

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