There's a sensible middle ground here. Take the paternalistic approach that (generally) protects people like my mum. Add settings that allow people like you and me to turn off updates or roll backwards. Push the people controlling the updates (like the Chrome store) to better protect their users.
I don’t like automatic updates and generally keep them disabled. Software upgrades tend to reduce functionality and instead force unnecessary UX redesigns on users, so I’d rather avoid them. I wish developers had the [EDIT: incentive] to release security patches independently from functionality changes, but few do that anymore, sadly.
You do realize it's not competence developers are lacking, it's resources that are finite, do you?
So off to analytics they would go. "X thousand users are using IE8. We're converting at X%. Removing support for IE8 just means these people will shop elsewhere and we'll lose X thousand pounds a month. You need to support IE8."
Believe me, I wish it was as simple as saying developers are "part of the problem," because it would be an easy fix. But try selling that (without a huuuuge struggle!) to the person who holds the purse strings.
Sadly the new features usually only came on new sites. It's much easier to push it through when you're not cutting off an existing income stream.
The failure is not that of Internet Explorer, but rather the OS in which it runs, which has a faulty security model. No operating system should trust executables with everything by default.
We all seem to forget that computing has changed drastically in the last decade.
That said, in that era it was often assumed (more so than now) that software the user installed himself is trusted.
If you make something available for people to toggle that improves their experience, people are going to take advantage of that even if they don't really grasp or decide to ignore the consequences. In the case of updates the improved experience is not being nagged or forced to restart an application or the whole OS. And unfortunately the only way to really gatekeep that control to people who know what they're doing is giving it enterprise pricing.
This is an assertion which begs many questions.
Who are these users? What do you mean by "generally"? What do you mean by "poor"? What do you mean with "managing software"? Which software specifically? Why is "managing software" hard? What are specific case where this might be true? Is this statement falsifiable?
For instance, how does age, social background, education level, language, culture,... factor into the experience of "managing software"? Sure, the problem can't be software itself in it's entirety?
See, statements like these tend to break down once you start digging into the murky nuances and specificities of reality.
Moreover, accepting them at face value tends to reinforce a belief which isn't based on fact: that the users of digital technology can't manage their devices, and therefore shouldn't be confronted with managing their devices.
... which is then translated and implemented in interfaces and systems that simply lack the functionality that gives users fine grained control over what is or isn't installed.
Over a longer term, this promotes a form of "lazy thinking" in which users simply don't question what happens under the hood of their devices. Sure, people are aware of the many issues concerning privacy, personal data, security and so on. But ask them how they could make a meaningful change, and the answers will be limited to what's possible within the limitations of what the device offers.
A great example of this would be people using a post-it to cover the camera in the laptop bezel.
People don't know what happens inside their machine, they don't trust what happens on their machine, and there's no meaningful possibility to look under the hood and come to a proper understanding... so they revert to the next sensible thing they have: taping a post-it over the lens.
The post-it doesn't solve the underlying issue - a lack of understanding which was cultivated - but it does solve a particular symptom: the inability to control what that camera does.
Demographics don't change the fact that if you don't automatically update software, many users simply won't. That's bad.
The internet is global, sometimes I think things get lost in translation.
I'm challenging your initial assertion that "people are poor at managing software". That's not enough of an explanation to support the second part of your claim:
> and as long as it works they'll happily and probably ignorantly run something that is not secure already and needs an update.
Are they poor at managing software because they are ignorantly running insecure software? Or are they ignorantly running insecure software because they are poor at managing software?
The replies so far take the entire context out of the picture and reframes the issue to "Users use their devices the 'wrong way'." and this can only be solved through technological advances.
I'm here questioning and challenging those assertions.
The collective Internet has been through this before and (mostly) learned its lesson. People don't run updates when it's not shoved down their throat. And it's not a small segment of people. And it hasn't changed. Look at how many hacks still happen because of servers and apps that aren't patched for known vulnerabilities. Or the prevalence of cryptojacking which is still largely based on known vulnerabilities that already have patches available - indicating it's successful enough that people keep doing it.
Most users don't question what happens under the hood of their devices because they don't care. They have other things to care about that actually mean something to them besides the nuances of the day to day maintenance of their devices. There does not exist an effective way of making people care about things like this, let alone educating the masses on how to appropriately choose which commit hash of their favorite browser extension they should really be on. How many security newsletters do you really expect the average person to be subscribed to in order to make informed decisions about these things?
Hell my "Update" notification on Chrome is red this morning and I'm at least in the top 10% of security-conscious folks in the world (it's really not a high bar).
I'm not saying automatic updates are without their problems - I'm in a thread on HN about that exact thing. But trying to claim it's somehow about sociodemographic issues and the answer is solving that and going back to selectively running updates is just ignoring the lessons of the past.
Users are "I, and everyone else I know".
Generally is "unless we need a feature".
Poor is "do not install updates to our software".
Managing software is "install updates".
Software is any software we use that provides updates, which is all of it.
Managing software is hard because doing it manually would require checking the website of every piece of software you've ever downloaded at regular intervals, where regular could be as frequently as minutes for security-critical tools.
If I ever downgrade my software and lock it to a specific version, I am now managing it manually, and all of the above applies.
I honestly don't think there are unquestioned assumptions here, because the task of keeping security-critical software up to date manually is nearly impossible for any user.
Vetting could be better with a lot of companies as well; remember not so long ago when Windows Defender decided a critical system file was malware and broke a ton of systems?
Verification. Vetting. Gradual release. Automatically disable extensions if they changed ownership, or if there's suspicious activity on the account of the owner (e.g. new login in another country).
And they need to take a MUCH harder stance on malware. Right now they're not even acknowledging there's a problem, let alone acting on it.
"Google will withhold $1 per user of your ad revenue forever. If your extension is found to contain malware, you forfeit all the $1's. Decisions on malware'y ness shall be made by XYZ malware researchers."
Allow a developer to get back their $1 when a user uninstalls the extension, or the developer stops making the extension. Also give the developer a certificate anytime showing how many $1's you hold of theirs (they could use that to get a loan from someone willing to trust them not to distribute malware).
I prefer automatic updates that are presented to the user for action, sadly feature update/release notes are often hidden or content-free (cf. Google's apps' updates on the Play Store) and downgrading path varies heavily with OS (easy on Linux, impossible on iOS).
Many users are going to change configuration because some tutorial on the internet somewhere tells them to do it, without totally understanding what they are doing, and are unlikely to revisit this configuration again ever. (Heck, I have done that with some configurations I don't totally understand, and don't even remember what I did and will never revisit to change back).
But it might be a fine way to do it.
But in analysis there is a shift from "can we blame someone else [users who ignored our advice] if the ecosystem ends up very insecure", to "how do we actually keep the ecosystem secure, not just have someone to blame when it isn't?" Doing the latter while also providing for user flexibility and autonomy can be a challenge for sure.
I have plenty of things I want to complain about when it comes to Google's user-adversity but mandatory automatic updates is definitely not one of them.
If you're a technical user and really know (or really think that you know) what you're doing there are ways to effectively freeze a given version of an extension.
Download and unpacking from github is a pita, I'd need to do this to each of my computers seperately
Switch to Chromium and use a package manager to stay up to date. Don't freeze updates, especially on your browser.
Security is often in tension with convenience/usability (as in this case).
Concretely: I don't update to the latest MacOS day of release. I do update after a few weeks of "no significant issues reported" (or I'll update manually faster if I learn of a serious exploit). I still haven't updated to BigSur as some of the software that I rely on doesn't work on BigSur yet, so I'm on the latest patch of Catalina.
But I install MacOS patch releases as soon as they are offered. It has never caused me a problem I am aware of, and I don't want to miss out on security patches, or even just bugfixes and perf improvements.
Heck, I actually just upgraded a MacBook that was still on 10.12, which was EOL'd. But I upgraded it because it was EOL'd, and wasn't getting patch releases for security fixes, and I want those patch releases as soon as they are released!
I don't know what x.0 software updates you're talking about (Chrome or Mac), but my comment never mentioned any. You don't seem to know that browser vendors don't really do those like OS vendors do. Either way, you can still avoid those while gettong security updates.
In my memory, there hasn't been a breaking auto-update in Chrome in years, but there have been hundreds of 0-days. The numbers don't really work out for the tradeoff you claim to be making.
Or not use chrome