Will that get rid of IE6 once for all?

I wonder if the user will need admin credentials to perform the update.

I have seen a couple reports that claim that a major reason people don't upgrade their browser version is they lack the permissions.

Automatic updates - crap. Hangs the parents PC halfway through, destroyed my system and I had to sys restore. Hangs next doors PC whilst updating.

I would warn EVERYONE to turn off automatic updates.

MrFewkes, guess they heard you :-)

The Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 Automatic Update Blocker toolkits prevent automatic upgrades of IE for Windows customers who do not want them.

Marshall

So what happens if you are on dial-up...? Unusable internet for a week?

That's not a question anyone should be asking in this day and age of high speed broadband :-)

I think this is potentially good news. Chrome has shown the way by automatically updating itself. Gone is the browser versions hell of the past.

Alas I'm still on XP so I guess my IE won't be upgrading (beyond security patches) any time soon :-(

That's not a question anyone should be asking in this day and age of high speed broadband :-)

Depends on where you live. There's no DSL or cable for much of the area where I live. The best I can do at my house is satelite, which is usually (i.e. evenings, weekends) somewhere around 300Kbps.

I did a speed test last night and got a record score of over 5000Kbps! When I mentioned online that I usually get around 4000Kbps, someone replied that I should ask for a refund! They get a lot faster than that!

I can't imagine going back to the slow days of dial-up. When I first started on the internet, I was using Netscape 2, back in the mid nineties. I recall waiting for single images to load slowly bit by bit - you could see them coming down the screen! I also used Opera as it allowed you to toggle images off easily, which let me surf a lot faster!

My speed now is just about OK. I could get a lot faster but I'd have to pay twice as much - no thanks!

I'm on ADSL, through the phone line. There was no cable available when I moved in, but since then Virgin have installed it.

If I were to start from scratch today I'd probably go with cable as it can go a heck of a lot faster than ADSL, as it's over fibre. It's clearly the future.

I'd have thought satellite would be pretty fast - I guess your post proves not! Hope you can upgrade to much faster soon.

Not to divert, but satelite is slow in general. Viasat has just launched a satelite that is advertised to make true 1.5Mbps possible for many users, but no matter how you cut it, every request makes the trip to geosynchronous orbit and back 4 times (click - up to satelite - down to server - up to satelite - down to your computer).

That 4x trip takes .5 seconds. So if you think of a page with an image, you have to request the page, then once it's loaded, request the image. That means 1 second of travel time at the speed of light without even considering going through the switches and server response time.

So as a bare min, you are looking at 1.2 seconds from click to image render. If all goes really well.

It's total hell on things like GMail who often think you're disconnected because the min response time on a ping is .5 sec.

All of this to say that I only use a laptop at home and I try to make it not do updates (virus sigs, windows patches or whatever) when I'm home, but to wait until I'm on a "fast" connection by our standards (when it's behaving well, it's 1.3Mbps. No chance of going faster than that until our phone system is upgraded or an entirely new technology comes along).

Automatic updates - crap. Hangs the parents PC halfway through, destroyed my system and I had to sys restore. Hangs next doors PC whilst updating.

Incremental updates, if things are kept current, shouldn't cause issues. Particularly an upgrade of IE isn't too major.

Fix it, upgrade it, sort it. If you're running an out-of-date version of XP you won't get much empathy from me.

So what happens if you are on dial-up...? Unusable internet for a week?

You presumably have Updates disabled or manual, for the same reason you wouldn't want to be automatically downloading the several hundred MB of routine updates per month.

Will that get rid of IE6 once for all?

I consider IE6 to be ridden. I simply don't chase IE 6 bugs anymore since IE 9 came out and I'm upfront to my clients about it.

PC's not running legitimate licensed Widows XP won't get ANY 'post SP2' updates for Automatic Updates. That includes Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8. These PCs will not pass the Windows Genuine test (a post XP SP2 HotFix) to get Windows XP SP3 (an Internet Explorer 7 prerequisite). Wonder if they changed their stance on unlicensed copies of Windows XP?

The code base used for Internet Explorer 9 doesn't allow installation on older PC's with Windows XP and older (can only be installed on Windows Vista and newer). So these users are stuck with Internet Explorer 7/8 as choices (from MS).

badbadmonkey says
"Incremental updates, if things are kept current, shouldn't cause issues. Particularly an upgrade of IE isn't too major.

Fix it, upgrade it, sort it. If you're running an out-of-date version of XP you won't get much empathy from me.
"

I rest my case.
"shouldnt"

lol

Seriously have you ever seen Updates kill a Win 7 install? I haven't.

Seriously have you ever seen Updates kill a Win 7 install? I haven't

IE6 on XP is still live in several places I know of and they have no intention of installing any upgrades. They browse using Firefox and/or Chrome, and have business critical reasons for keeping IE6 handy. IE7 and/or IE8 just break too many things for them to want to change.

I found out three months ago that upgrading IE8 to IE9 on Windows 7 is a great way to seriously break *printing* in Outlook 2003(!) - with no known fix. I know we webmasters think that shiny new HTML features are cool, but back in the real world, bring able to print out emails might just rate as "far more important" for some people :-)

Oh, and I was at my doctor's practice last week and noticed they are currently using ... wait for it ... Windows 2000 Professional <giggles>

Windows 2000 Professional is what I use for my IE6 and older Firefox testing.

I recycled a friend's old laptop into a useful tool.

Those of us with production machines still running XP should update/upgrade as far as possible. I'm up to date and still happy. Though I can see that it won't be much longer before these still useful machines will just not quite cut it (sigh!). I don't have to worry about IE9 since IE8 is the only supported "latest" version for XP.