The wonders of Automatic updates.

There's a good chance that 90% of the people that got IE7 don't even know they have it.

What people should be wondering is why only 25% of users got this critical update.

On the bright side this web browser grew faster then FireFox. The down side is that it was probably due to it being a critical update and only 25% of the people seem to have Automatic Windows update turned on.

Things that make you go... WTF?

IE7 works better than FF for me including actually allowing me to access my Internet banking.It also loads pictures faster.

IE7 I like; I was rather impressed to see it actively recover site icons in 'Favorites', whereas IE6 lost them faster than water from a sieve. However, in contrast to when i was running an IE6 system, my computer tends to randomly lose the ability to talk to a DNS server, especially after sitting idle for a while.

Then I have to either wait a minute and let XP rediscover the art of (network) conversation, or else flush the DNS cache, and suddenly things are happy again. Very annoying.

First off...........it is a browser for the love of god. Which is just a small piece of software used to access web pages for the most part. Anyone that is passionate about it....needs to get a life.

I think the more important point here is the fact that only 25% of windows users use Automatic updates?????

99% of malware/exploits or whatever you call it....can be stopped by Automatic updates and smart computing (safe surfing and email usuage). Add in some free MS Defender and a cheap router and it is you will never have a problem....almost.

Auto-matic updates=seatbelts....common sense says you should use both....and if you dont then its your fault when there is a problem.

Before the "Firefox is l33t" and "Oh n03s, it is the b00bish Aut0matic Updat3s" crowd gets in here, I'd like to say that this is really impressive, and kudos to the IE7 team. I use IE7 on a daily basis, and have stopped using FF altogether because I enjoy IE7 more. The only real complaint I have (besides more 3rd Party support for plug-ins and gadgets) is the speed of the Phishing Filter - if you have a page with a lot of objects it can feel like 56k all over again.

I can hear the Firefox fanboys high-pitched shrieks of dismay from here.

You can give all the kudos you want. We all know that forcing people to upgrade to IE7 as a critical update makes people use the new browser. I can tell you that all of my family still uses FF per me and non of them would know how to stop IE7 from installing either. So I am sure they all have IE7 and but are using it only rarely.

I couldnt get the linky thing to work properly :(
Thanx for posting it tho :)

I really wonder where the percentages come from. Not that it matters in the end. As long as MS basically forces their stuff through their OS, it will almost always be on top because there are always going to be new, uninformed people out there. And with the recent crap tactics that MS is pulling for Vista (DX10 exclusive, for example) it's not surprising that their stuff gets used.

Personally I suggest Opera to everyone I know because of, well, many reasons. The big one is the independancy from large companies like Microsoft & AOL.

What people don't realize (I guess) is Firefox is basically owned by Mozilla which is owned by AOL. For lots of people that means little or nothing to them, but seeing how I really don't care for MS or AOL's buisness tactics, I try to get people to steer clear from their products.

Furthermore, Opera just has the most features out of the box and in the smallest package. There's no need to spend more time to get extensions or toolbars or whatever, plenty is already at your fingertips from the get-go. Plus it follows the most web standards, hands down.

But hey, that's just my personal opinion. *shrugs*

I'll get to see IE 7 when my clients move to it sometime in 2010. They are in the finall rollout stage for XP SP1 (IE 6) for the business. So thats were I will have to stay (at least for dev machines). Still its better than NT 4 SP4 and IE 4.

In other news, the browser wars have been over for years yet FF and MS fanboys failed to realize it.

I had IE7 and uninstalled it, though I can't remember exactly why. I know it was causing some sort of problem with my system and that's when I switched to FF. Couldn't be happier with my browser.

Making it an automatic update was a good thing. If XP had come with a firewall enabled in the first place, like every modern OS these days, we wouldn't likely see the issues that we do with botnets.

Firefox is l33t

Yeah, it was pretty much the automatic update that fasttracked the adoption.

IF they hadn't made it a critical update - that number would have been much lower . . . .IMHO.