14 DAY TRIAL // With Mozilla churning out a new Firefox every six weeks or so, even with the automated update mechanism, some people are starting to worry whether people really can keep up with the latest version, even if they want to.
With each upgrade cycle, some people get left behind, even with the automated update system.
Pingdom has looked at StatCounter data and has extrapolated that version fragmentation is becoming a problem for Mozilla. For example, it looked at the current state of Firefox.
Indeed, the majority of users are running the latest officially released version, Firefox 7. But it's a small majority, only 56 percent of Firefox users are up to date.
Plenty of people are still using the ancient Firefox 3.6. 28 percent of Firefox users are running 3.6 or older, but most of them are on Firefox 3.6. There's a good reason for this, it's the last 'traditional' Firefox version and the last one to get good enterprise support.
Finally, there are 15 percent of users who are now running 'obsolete' versions of the browser, which would be Firefox 4, Firefox 5 and Firefox 6. For a variety of reasons, they haven't yet updated.
This, Pingdome believes, shows that Firefox has a real problem. What's more, it believes that this problem will get worse as more and more people are left behind with each update.
But that may not be the case. While it's true that some Firefox users fail to upgrade their browser consistently as new versions come along, the ones that stuck with Firefox 4, 5, 6 haven't done so by choice, most often, but by simple ignorance.
Many would have had Firefox installed by someone else, which would have grabbed the latest version, but wouldn't exactly know how to update to a newer version when it became available, even with the automatic update mechanism. Or the update mechanism simply failed to work.
But those users will finally have someone fix their computer and update Firefox.
There will always be a number of people who don't update their browser, for various reasons, but that number will probably stay the same, even as Firefox updates.
Even now, Firefox 4 users are the fewest, there are more Firefox 5 users and even more Firefox 6 users.
Of course, the silent, automated update mechanism Mozilla has planned may prove even more useful at getting people to update to the latest version, even if they do it unknowingly.