Abstract
We analyze the effectiveness of different Web browser update mechanisms on various operating systems; from Google Chrome’s silent update mechanism to Opera’s update requiring a full re-installation. We use anonymized logs from Google’s world wide distributed Web servers. An analysis of the logged HTTP user-agent strings that Web browsers report when requesting any Web page is used to measure the daily browser version shares in active use. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first global scale measurement of Web browser update effectiveness comparing four different Web browser update strategies including Google Chrome. Our measurements prove that silent updates and little dependency on the underlying operating system are most effective to get users of Web browsers to surf the Web with the latest browser version.
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References
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Duebendorfer, T., Frei, S. (2010). Web Browser Security Update Effectiveness. In: Rome, E., Bloomfield, R. (eds) Critical Information Infrastructures Security. CRITIS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6027. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14379-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14379-3_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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