A couple of days ago Microsoft announced that beginning in January they would automatically update their IE browser in the same fashion as Chrome and Firefox. People will be able to opt out through settings and your update will be dependent upon the operating system.
One of the reasons given for this was that most people simply don't care what version of browser they have. And when informed that an update is available, the majority of folks will balk at it, sometimes leaving them in a vulnerable security position. It seems that people don't want to mess with their computers when they're working just fine OR that they don't believe the threats to their online security are all that vital. Bottom line: many just don't want to do it.
We here on SillyDog701 are a very small group of folk compared to the general computing population and many of us are obsessed with this stuff, overly concerned about our browsers and email programs. Lately I find myself more and more disinterested in doing any of this manually. I've become more complacent about the whole thing. This change in attitude began a few years ago when I began setting my OS to update itself automatically and I've never been bothered with an update since. Yesterday as I was about to shut down my computer, I saw that 16 critical updates would be installed so that when I booted up the following morning my computer would be good to go. I like that. It just works. Twelve months ago I set all of my other programs to do the same... auto-update. If you asked me what version of a browser or email program I had, I would need to check the Help and About section or look at the user agent string because off the top of my head I don't know and I don't care.
If you look at my user agent string you'll see that I have the latest browser but only because the settings were tweaked to auto-update. I'm not suggesting this is the best way to go about it but it's my way and it's been working just fine. In my view, MS is moving in the right direction by doing this. I see that Facebook will auto-update to the new version next Friday whether folks like it or not. My guess is that most software will do this, freeing us up to do more important things; the things we came online to do: communicate, learn, read, shop, pay our bills, play...
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:9.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0
