"the pain" ? Look at Firefox, it checks if their is a new updates and asks you if you want to update. (Well last time I checked anyway). So unless you disable those update checks, yes, then it might be a pain. But you either want that or not.
In the past, when it didn't, people got stuck on old, insecure versions. There was a period of time (pre-Chrome) where people would replace IE with Firefox for their parents, and then their parents would be many versions behind.
Thanks for reminding me of more information that proves my point. If people aren't forced to update, many of them won't, and that makes all of us less safe.
This is actually an identical controversy to vaccinations. Saying that you're against automatic updates because 0.000001% of people have problems with them is the same argument that anti-vaxxers make.
