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As web dev, I am aware of a pain to work with old browsers. However, as user/customer, I perfectly feel for people who have better things to do with their lives

As web dev, I am aware of a pain to work with old browsers. However, as user/customer, I perfectly feel for people who have better things to do with their lives, then download, upgrade, update, sometimes spending hours, breaking things, spending more hours to repair them, and so on. In the ideal world, upgrading should be easy and fast, and provide an easy reverse if the user is not happy. As we know, this is not the case, so how can we blame the user for getting stuck with the old system that reliably worked?

jblok 12y ago
Sure, but once you upgrade to a certain point, your browser should update itself automagically. I know for sure that Chrome auto-updates, as does (I think) IE9. So once that initial investment has been made, this argument doesn't hold true
- dmitri145 12y ago
  Browser update stops once you reach the last version supported by your OS. From there, you have to upgrade OS and that is not as easy or risk-free, unfortunately.
toxican 12y ago
In what way isn't it easy/fast now? Upgrading from something like IE7 is as easy and downloading/installing and you're done. It'll hold your hand through carrying over your data from the old browser and even ask if you want it to be the new default. Then updates from there are done automatically in the background without any user input.
- dmitri145 12y ago
  Can't speak about the M$oft world that I left long ago. However, as far as I understand, the issue is the OS, and many people simply prefer XP. But Mac OS is no different. I've been on OS 10.5 and when Google stopped supporting Chrome there, it suddenly stopped working with Youtube. Luckily, I've found a hack and wrote a script launching Chrome without that disable setting. Which proves that there was absolutely no reason to forcefully disable what worked for users for many years.
- xg15 12y ago
  But how about the part where you can also reverse the update easily because you don't like the UI changes or an important extension broke?

jblok 12y ago

Sure, but once you upgrade to a certain point, your browser should update itself automagically. I know for sure that Chrome auto-updates, as does (I think) IE9. So once that initial investment has been made, this argument doesn't hold true

dmitri145 12y ago
Browser update stops once you reach the last version supported by your OS. From there, you have to upgrade OS and that is not as easy or risk-free, unfortunately.

toxican 12y ago

In what way isn't it easy/fast now? Upgrading from something like IE7 is as easy and downloading/installing and you're done. It'll hold your hand through carrying over your data from the old browser and even ask if you want it to be the new default. Then updates from there are done automatically in the background without any user input.

dmitri145 12y ago
Can't speak about the M$oft world that I left long ago. However, as far as I understand, the issue is the OS, and many people simply prefer XP. But Mac OS is no different. I've been on OS 10.5 and when Google stopped supporting Chrome there, it suddenly stopped working with Youtube. Luckily, I've found a hack and wrote a script launching Chrome without that disable setting. Which proves that there was absolutely no reason to forcefully disable what worked for users for many years.
xg15 12y ago
But how about the part where you can also reverse the update easily because you don't like the UI changes or an important extension broke?