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Google Chrome wins browser updating race

By Sean Michael Kerner on May 8, 2009 4:21 PM

From the 'manual updates don't work' files:

Browser vendors all update their software often to patch for security issues. The problem is that not all browser users update to the latest versions quickly, if at all.

A new study from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Stefan Frei and Google's Thomas Duebendorfer looked at how quickly users were updating their browsers based on an analysis of the user-agent string that Google sees.

Google's log files show that after 21 days of a Google Chrome release, 97 percent of users were updated to the latest version. Mozilla Firefox had 85 percent of users updated within 21 days. Apple's Safari only had 53 percent of users updated.

The study did not include Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which I found to be very surprising, but they do have a good explanation. It's just not all that easy to see if IE is actually updated.

"Microsoft Internet Explorer only reports the major version number and omits the minor version number in the user agent string," the study states. "The often stated reason for this omission is to reduce information leakage and make it harder for an attacker to select a working exploit for the actual browser version in use...Therefore, based solely on our Web server logs, we cannot determine the update speed of minor versions within the Microsoft Internet Explorer population."

So why did Google win in the update race?

Google has an automated update process for Chrome with its GoogleUpdate.exe process which runs in the background on users PC's. The tool recently became available as open source in order to mitigate concerns over privacy. Both Mozilla and Apple use update mechanisms that require user interaction. That is the user has to click something in order to be updated.

It's an interesting analysis to see how by automating the process, that one browser is up to date quicker than any other. That said, Firefox's numbers aren't too shabby either. I'm really curious to see what Microsoft's true numbers are using a similiar kind of test.

Whether or not other browser vendor learn from Google remains to be seen. Frankly I don't think Mozilla will move to the silent update model as it removes a degree of user choice (yeeah the choice to run insecure software), but perhaps there could be more in-your-face alerts to ensure that users know it is time to update.

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