August 26, 2009, 8:12 AM — Despite the repeat recommendations from Mozilla to upgrade to Firefox 3.x in order to browse as safely as possible, some users prefer to stay put with Firefox 2.x. Mozilla decided to find out why.
Users of older Firefox versions who have update-checking enabled, but never actually update, were surveyed regarding why they don’t download the new version.
Back in May, when Mozilla launched a campaign to get users to update to current versions of Firefox, it found that 10 percent of users were still on the older version. A few weeks later that percentage of laggards lowered to 8 percent, and Mozilla added a survey to its update-checking feature to find out reasons for not upgrading.
Close to 5,000 users responded, here are some of the reasons cited:
Location bar (25 percent) – “…the browser is not very secure if browsing history cannot be deleted from the location bar…”
Speed/memory leak concerns (13 percent) – “I had heard it made your computer run slowly when it first came out…”
Add-on compatibility (13 percent) - “There are a number of add-ons which will not work with Firefox 3 …”
Look and feel (11 percent) - “Compared to v2, v3 has an interface that sucks, sucks, sucks big time.”
Bookmarks (8 percent) – “Getting to alphabetized bookmarks with the latest version is a serious pain…”
Mozilla promises to analyze the feedback and “discuss possible implications from a product standpoint.”
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