|
 |
|
Shop
You are here: News > News > Silent updates improve security, based on study
| » IT Security NEWS |
| » 04 May 2009 |
| Silent updates improve security, based on study |
| The best way of strengthening your browser\'s security? Update quietly. Based on a joint study conducted by Google Switzerland and the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, the more time and energy an update asks from the user, the more likely the user will abort the update or even avoid it altogether. Based on the study, the Opera browser, which requires users to download updates manually led to only 24 percent of its control group users having the latest version. Compare this scenario with Google\'s Chrome. Chrome automatically downloads and installs updates without telling or asking the user\'s permission. This is the so-called "silent update". Chrome\'s control users were observed 21 days later, in which 97 percent of them are already running the most current version. But then again, you can\'t disable automatic updates in Chrome. Meanwhile, 85 percent of Mozilla Firefox\'s control users are on the Net using its recent version as observed 21 days after its release. For Safari, the figure is 53 percent. No result is available for Internet Explorer because its web servers could not make measurements and thus could not give details on its patch state, the researchers explained. Because of this study, Google Switzerland and ETH strongly advise web browser developers to conduct "silent" updates. Opera has taken the first move by planning to launch automatic updates for its soon-to-be-relased version 10. However, it still really boils down to the users themselves to ensure that their browsers would be less vulnerable. In spite of the security benefits of "silent" updates, the loss of user control associated with it can be a turn-off. Not all of us might want new versions on our hard disk. Likewise, the issue of whether "silent" updates should be limited to security-related ones, or include fresh browser capabilities should also be discussed. Full details of this study can be found online as "Why Silent Updates Boost Security" at http://www.techzoom.net/publications/silent-updates/ |
 |
 |
Awards & Reviews | |||||
|
||||||
|
|
Subscribe to our Mailing List |
|
|
|
|
Customer References | |
|
||
