Linux Users Slowest to Update Firefox

My screengrab script for Mozilla Labs Ubiquity (think of Ubiquity as an extensible command-line interface for Firefox… if you can imagine that) gets fairly regular hits.  Depending on the user’s preference, each time they start Firefox a request will be made to my site to check for any newer version of the script.

This means that for some users I get a web server log message every time they start their browser.

One interesting statistic I’ve uncovered from these logs is a startling lack of hits from Firefox 3.5 on Linux systems.  It seems that almost no one running Linux has bothered to upgrade to the shiny, if not a little over-hyped, latest offering from the Mozilla team.

These ugly charts show the picture somewhat better than words can.  (Can anyone recommend a prettier, free charting tool?).

As the pies show, only 4% of the 70 Linux users to hit my site in the last 5 days have upgraded to Firefox 3.5.  Compare that with the 76% and 56% of Windows and Mac users respectively and you cannot deny the conclusion that Linux users are slow adopters.

Of course the reason behind the slow adoption is obvious: the ever so slightly Orwellian package maintainers.  Ubuntu (which comprises 58 of my 70 Linux visitors) only makes Firefox 3.5 available in development repositories, not the main-line.  It’ll be the default browser come Karmic Koala, but do we really all have to wait until October for a faster Javascript engine and what not?

There are more ways to get Firefox 3.5 into your Linux distro than I care to name or describe.  But all of these either find ways around your package manager or use untrusted 3rd-party repositories.

So for the sake of keeping your system stable, the pragmatic thing to do on the Linux desktop is to wait until your distro decides to support the software you want to use.  That is hardly putting the user in control.

There has to be a better way.