The value of auto-updates

Posted by Kelson on Mon, 01/15/2007 - 21:13Using Firefox

I just noticed something interesting on my website stats.  For the first 15 days of January (well, 14½ days), Firefox accounted for 22.5% of my hits.  The top three versions were:

Firefox 2.0.0.1
    9.7%
Firefox 1.5.0.9
    9.2%
Firefox 1.0.7
    0.8%

Notice anything interesting? The first two are the most recent security releases in major versions that have had auto-update. 1.0.7, however, is not. In fact, 1.0.8 (which is the most recent security release in the 1.0 series) comes in at only 68 hits, less than any other non-beta release, and registering 0%.

It looks like a lot of people stopped at 1.0.7 -- the last release before Firefox 1.5 -- and never updated to 1.0.8.  By contrast, people on the 1.5 series have mostly updated to 1.5.0.9 (which came out after Firefox 2).  What's different?  Auto-updates.


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Interesting observation
Submitted by ottodv on Tue, 01/16/2007 - 12:25.

After reading your post I analysed my numbers for yesterday, and found the same thing. In fact no-one visited my site using 1.0.8 (while there were still about 200 pageviews with 1.0.x versions). There were even 2 pageviews with Firebird...

So it would seem that the lack Auto update is the cause of version 1.0.x not being updated by more people. It can also be that people who are more aware of keeping their software up to date have all left version 1.0.x behind anyway. Also updating 1.0.x versions was a bit more time consuming than it is now, so if some-one is going to make the effort they might as well update to 2.0.

Firefox 2.0.0.1   2354
Firefox 2.0          84

Firefox 1.5.0.9   2165
Firefox 1.5.0.8   16
Firefox 1.5.0.7   59
Firefox 1.5.0.6   24
Firefox 1.5.0.5   4
Firefox 1.5.0.4   19
Firefox 1.5.0.3   7
Firefox 1.5.0.2   10
Firefox 1.5.0.1   11
Firefox 1.5         19

Firefox 1.0.7      147
Firefox 1.0.6      28
Firefox 1.0.5      2
Firefox 1.0.4      28
Firefox 1.0.3      3
Firefox 1.0.2      7
Firefox 1.0.1      7
Firefox 1.0         18

Firefox 0.10.1   2
Firefox 0.10      3
Firefox 0.9.3     1
Firefox 0.8        1
Firebird 0.7      2

Otto - Mozilla and Firefox Search

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Interesting observation.  I
Submitted by GamingG on Mon, 01/15/2007 - 21:29.

Interesting observation.  I think that the average user would not know that they needed to download the latest version, since that user is probably used to getting notifications about updates in other programs.

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