Silent Update For Mozilla's Firefox 13 Fails to Boost Browser's Uptake

From PC World: Mozilla's new silent updater has not sped up the migration to Firefox 13, according to usage statistics compiled by an Irish metrics company.

Mozilla engineers speculated that an emergency update -- which Mozilla calls a "chem spill" -- that was released June 15 may have slowed the upgrade tempo.

Firefox 13, which launched June 5, was the first upgrade that Mozilla shipped after it seeded users with silent updating as part of the preceding edition, Firefox 12.

Mozilla's silent update service sidesteps Windows User Account Control, or UAC, to push updates in the background so that users receive browser updates without interrupting their work.

"Once a user gives explicit permission to Firefox on their first installation, they will not be prompted again for subsequent releases," Mozilla said at the time in a blog post explaining the new process.

But data from Irish Web metrics company StatCounter shows that Firefox 13 was used less during its first 20 days than was Firefox 12 over a similar span. StatCounter's numbers hint that the silent updating service did not speed up the migration to Firefox 13 or result in more users running that version.

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