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Comment by heimidal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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.

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

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

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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