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A lot of people turn off the Startup Page. It would be nice if the same popup notification in the lower-right that advertises component updates also notified users every time there was a new release of the IDE available to download.
Definitely something BADLY needed. I had to accidentally stumble upon a post on reddit to see that Netbeans 7.3 was released. I'm still using 7.1 because i never knew 7.2 was released.