(The context of this forum thread is that I'm the developer of thetriton.com and work on yachts.)

A captain and I had a discussion today at Bahia Mar about all the same large yachts that show up there each winter. Unlike a few years ago when people were upgrading their yachts to new builds, these yachts have started to look like they are taking on some character and age, a little more oxidation on the paint each year. It really changes the feel and experience of being on the end dock of Bahia Mar.

In the pilot house of the yacht today, I took a moment to share a preview of a website I've been working on for the past 6 weeks.The computer for browsing the internet was the original computer that came with the yacht and was running a very old version of Internet Explorer 7. My new website which tracks piracy, however, is using state of the art web based mapping software that, much to my displeasure, had a little glitch on this old version of IE7. So I went to the Internet Explorer website and upgraded the browser software which is free and only takes a minute to do. I also installed Google Chrome because it is a much nicer and lot faster browser to use.

There is actually a larger issue of running old browsers on board yachts and that is security vulnerabilities. If you do not upgrade your browser you are open to several security holes that can be leveraged by hackers to do things as milicious as install a keystroke logger on that computer.

From wikipedia:

"According to the latest information, security research firm SecurityFocus reports that IE6 has 396 known unpatched vulnerabilities, IE7 has 22, and IE8 has 25. The oldest known unpatched vulnerabilities for IE6, IE7, and IE8 date from November 20, 2000, May 17, 2007, and April 11, 2009 respectively."

Every time you click a link you request a webpage. And, with each request you send a lot of information about yourself such as the type of browser making the request and the location of the computer -- the server needs to know exactly where to send the information. I'm not going to say how many people visit thetriton.com using IE6 or IE7 but it's way too many! Please, for security and browsing speed, upgrade your browsers.

If a Windows based computer on a yacht is mission critical (i.e. running Nobeltec) , do not upgrade without a full backup or have a professional do it. However, if the old computer is running the navigation software, you shouldn't be browsing the internet with it. If you work in a company or the yacht has custom software built years ago that requires using IE6, don't be afraid to add another browser such as Google Chrome to safely browse the internet, of course taking care to backup first. It's free, easy to do and only takes a couple of minutes.

If you work on a Paul Allen yacht please go here to upgrade your browser.

If you work for Russians stay ahead of the curve and use the open source browser FireFox.

Or, consider trying my favorite, Google Chrome.