Many web site developers want people to run only the very latest browser. Many businesses have other things they consider more important to do that be constantly updating software to the latest and greatest version. How old would a web browser need to be, since its release (not since it was installed), to make it really important to be upgraded? But in particular, how young can it be where saying "not now" is a justified response when someone (especially a web site) says it needs to be upgraded?

FYI, I am using a browser many sites no longer consider acceptable, but it works fine on LQ. It's 18 months old since it was released. But I am not interested in whether it is too old or not. I'm interested in when it should be upgraded, and how I should make business plans for such purposes. Is it ever necessary to upgrade a browser more often than the host OS/distribution?

Having worked in web development, I can tell you that the decision is not arbitrary, but rather is based on features lacking in the older browsers. It's a vast topic but here's some basic reading material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-browser

From a security (not compatibility) standpoint, my advice is to upgrade your browser whenever prompted (I do once a week), so that you have the latest patches.

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depends, if you use MS Windows, than yes, you should update your browser as often as an update is available. Using major Linux distributions, the distribution maintainers often package the latest browser into the updates, at least as long as the distribution is maintained, usually they package a version of the browser that has non-package based updates disabled, so you almost have to wait until the distribution offers the update through the repository, or uninstall the browser and install a plain vanilla version of browser, and manually update it, which is often not worth the effort.

in short, as long as you keep your distribution up to date you probably aren't going too be more than a couple revisions out of date on the browser, and thus rarely too far out of compatibility with what 95-99% of the web has to offer.

keep in mind the browser is only half the picture of compatibility, also the plugins (such as flash plugin) also have to be kept up to date.

that being said, keeping the browser/plugins up to date manually is often more work than is worth, compared to being slightly out of date from the repositories.

And which browser is it?

If a browser or plugin upgrade fixes security problems then it shouldn't be any question.

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For security reasons you should keep your browser updated as much as possible.

For user reasons, i.e. website usage, the latest browsers offer so much more than say Firefox 2, 3, or 4 did. HTML5 is now fast becoming the standard for website development and it helps, to a certain extent, to do away with the need for some plugins like Flash while still being able to use old technology, again Flash, for websites that are built using XHTML as an example.

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If there is an update it needs to be updated.

The same goes for plugins, especially java and flash.

For both security reasons and for newer features like html5 you should always be using the current release version of any web browser.

Your web browser is independent of the OS you are running.

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