Web browser versions are dead – automatic updates is the future

The vast majority of non-technical users, if asked, would say "all software should be like that."

My big problem with this is that many web service vendors (particularly in education) do not play well with the latest version of any browser. I currently need to keep IE8 on the lab machines for all the student online class software. We actually delayed our WinXP to W7 jump because it took so long to clear anything over IE6.

For consumers, this is fine, but for IT this is a nightmare. I really don't want to come into work and find all of the machines updated and none of the software working.

That's a great idea in general. Not so much in a corporate environment where there may be a piece of older software that is still in use but that no longer requires active development.

In that case, you want to lock the version - you don't want it to suddenly break because of a browser update and don't want to devote additional dev time to a finished product that was working just fine.

It'd be nice if browsers automatically updated but could also be forced to run as a specific version (e.g. IE8's Developer Tools lets you run as IE7). Like version control for software (when loading website X, run as browser v2).

I'll take automatic updates IF there is an option to prompt before update.

I get daily builds of Chrome (under Ubuntu) and 1 day there was an update that caused Chrome not to start up. After that day I don't blindly do updates if I really need the browser to work.

The user interface for FF4 sucks, I had to uninstall it and re-download FF3.6. Most of the differences were merely irritating - like the right click menu changing the places of Open in New Tab and Open in New Window, which was totally stupid, but I could have gotten used to that. The one change I could not do without and could find no way to restore was their eliminating the Recent Pages button - some sites take forever to click back through with the Back button alone.