One of the 'duties' you acquire as the member of the family who knows something about computers is that you end up trying to keep your parents' computer updated with software patches etc.

One of the 'duties' you acquire as the member of the family who knows something about computers is that you end up trying to keep your parents' computer updated with software patches etc.

Adobe Reader is not so good in this regard. The machine had version 4.1.2, and the latest version is 4.1.6. Now rather than offering to update from 4.1.2 directly, it would download and install 4.1.3, 4.1.4 and 4.1.5, before finally downloading and installing 4.1.6. Admittedly it did install partial patches, rather than downloading full versions of each, but it still meant having to repeatedly check for updates. I don't think many users would know to do it more than once.

Firefox, on the other hand, has a much better update process - it will always download the latest stable version, even if there have been less recent updates that haven't been installed. Co-incidentally, Firefox 3.5 was released today, so regardless of what version you are running now, you should be able to check for updates and get the very latest edition.