I haven't seen any note worthy changes for that screen reader in the past 4 years to justify an upgrade. I'll use NVDA, thanks.

Well, as i've been using jaws for 11 years, i'm sticking with it and not upgrading to NVDA. There are a couple of features I really like about this version, like OCR of entire pdf documents, the command search, and the recovery feature.
I also heard that in one of the FS casts, freedom scientific is going to a payment plan with jaws.

Well, OCR is never perfect. It depends heavily on your screen resolution to work properly. However, the inhanced PDF OCR doesn't depend on your resolution and is very nearly perfect. I was trying it yesterday with an inaccessible pdf.

I think they did improve word proformence in jaws 16. It was on the feature list at least.

Reguarding scripts, I hardly ever use them, as number 1 i have found no need for them, and 2 if I do use scripts, most of them are preinstalled by default.

I'm not saying research it is a useless thing to have in a screen reader. What I'm saying is that it doesn't really belong there. As has already been said there are other programs which can do what research it and the OCR in JAWS do, only better.
It's usually better to have one great cake rather than several half baked ones and I feel FS is currently baking too many of them. Projects which aren't necessarily bad, but not the most important are being worked on, seemingly primarily. While improving performance, which helps everyone, appears to have been put on a shelf. Also, what's the point of OCR scanning a document if the program which helps you read that document is clunky?
As to bugs, I really don't know of any, so not sure what people are talking about there either. Apart from the eloquence crash words, which while perhaps not caused by JAWS are totally unacceptable in a synthesizer in my opinion.
In short, I think FS needs to get their performance up to scratch first, then they can focus on other stuff. Although I'd still prefer it if they would limit it to the primary purpose of a screen reader.

At this point, I just upgrade as a duty, to get the latest bugfixes. There really is nothing here I actually want. Hmm, perhaps this is the end of the line for me? After all, I'm now on OS X most days, and XP is my only VM and won't run this release.

One issue with FS is the authorization method. Sure, the client activator is cool, but really? And the locking code? That can be easily cracked? No way! Another issue with FS is that they use incredibly old technology like video display drivers which, in my opinion, suck. Window Eyes, for instance, does not require its video display driver to be attached to operate; it still works perfectly. Although video display drivers are good, they are quite old, and since they're so old, why can't screen readers simply used the already installed video display drivers to read text on the screen? NvDA and System Access can do that. Window Eyes can do that. Why can't JAWS and some of the other companies which use these drivers.
One other thing about VDDs is they slow down performance greatly. That's why JAWS is slow in massive documents in word 2010 and earlier. The VDD has to send text to JAWS manually every time new text arrives and, therefore, slows down the machine because each line of text is being processed. NVDA works extremely quickly with word 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002, 2013, etc, and has almost no issues with it, while JAWS has lots of them. One of these is the ability to read symbols. It sometimes fails to recognize the symbol list, and just thinks its a graphic which has no navigability. The ribbon also slows things down. Again, the video intercept driver does all of this. This is not JAWS's falt directly; its the old technology that FS uses, old technology that they won't break away from.

@Gellman: you may be right. Let us hope that networking interfaces become standardised. To judge from touch-screen printers and set-top boxes, though, you would seem to be correct, so far.

JAWS Pro has no business existing; it is an aberration. The entire activation model is an insult to the customer.

But as long as I own JAWS and recommend it to Windows users, I really have no business complaining. I trust NVDA users everywhere to erode FS' market share to the best of their ability.

My belief is that every screen reader has been built with its purpose, a purpose usually reflected by the title of the screen reader if you look closely enough, and not every screen reader is meant for everyone, even if everyone can use it.  JAWS stands for job access with speech, which is a reflective name of the produc that has been catering to many in various corporate environments for a very long time.  it was not intended to be purchased by the average consumer, a belief I've held in my mind for many years and which is sadly a mistake I'm sure many others has made.  Why they didn't decide to focus on accessibility for all rather than accessibility for the workforce is beyond me, but that is indeed the route they chose to travel.  I have heard from various people that features like the infamous and widely argued research-it feature have proved useful when working in job environments that require quick information such as the tracking of shipments or other orders customers have placed, and various other systems, and is it not possible for developers to take tools from the FS website and develop for the research-it engine to fit their own needs?  I'm fairly certain I've heard this somewhere, though I'm willing to admit to misinformation given that I haven't messed with that tool very much.
NVDA stands for Non Visual Desktop Access, though it provides more than access to desktop material or desktop computers for that matter.  It is a screen reader that does its best to tackle every day computer usage and to provide it to everyone equally.  Employers and employees or home business owners, techies and gamers and heavy multimedia consumers as home and abroad, productive members of society and young children looking for something to do, teachers or students, young, old, ritch and poor, NVDA has you covered on both basic needs and many more advanced necessities.  It's userbase is quickly growing, possibly owing to the fact that more people are switching to it for one, but we must also take into consideration the people who previously didn't have a screen reader because they didn't have the money to shell out for JAWS or WindowEyes or anything else on the market.  If I ran into a family with a blind child or teen, I would have the parents look into getting that child a PC and have NVDA installed on it, not because I have a personal preference for the screen reader, but because it makes sense from a financial and usage standpoint.  Unless the child is learning more complex tasks than the basics of computer information management and the occasional word processing that might involve formatting for school essays and the like, what does he need with a $1000 product?
if the people working at corporations are still finding JAWS a useful product, or the people who use it on a daily basis because they work from home, or the college students who find they can accomplish tasks more efficiently with it, or the people who use it because they've used it all of their life, what can we, NVDA users who have probably mastered just about every other screen reader companies have thrown at us over the years, possibly say to kill the production of a product that has accumulated fame for being an easy enough screen reader to learn for anyone and everyone?  NVDA is not that product; indeed most of the stories I hear involve getting used to it over a period of time that differs from person to person.  JAWS was a screen reader I was able to pick up a fair amount of knowledge on in a couple of days, which was good because I needed it while going to school.  I doubt I would have been able to do the same with NVDA, given that most of its help resources are scattered across the web and I'd have had to learn how to use a web browser to begin getting at them.  JAWS now has most of this information at your fingertips, or one could have it sent to them with the product to their home if they so chose to have it that way, and can even have people who are trained in the department of teaching them how to use it properly come to their home and instruct them further.
It may boil down to personal preference in some cases; I won't deny that, and that should be respected.  There is, however, a set of needs met by every screen reader that should also be taken into consideration if only grudgingly.  While we frown down upon the companies that seem to use uselessness to make money, other people's lives are being made easier by what we just don't see any purpose for and which we might see a point to in the future.  am I saying I wouldn't like to see more as far as screen reader innovation is concerned?  Certainly not.  I doubt we can blame any one screen reader or company for its practices though, else I could probably point my finger at apple for not doing enough, and yet most of it's customers are perfectly satisfied with voiceover as is, so what can I do?

Hi all (and again, excuse my english):

I agree, there isn't much innovation during last years. It is the case for JAWS, but it is the case for NVDA and Voiceover too (fanboys, don't kill me, let me explain).

Nvda, for example, has been started from nothing, so, during its first years, it has been trying to be as useful as its competitors (in its early releases it was a kind of Narrator plus). Now it's a great option, but in fact NVDA is just starting to improve brand new features. Ok, ok, object navegator is new, but in my opinion it's another way to do what jaws has been doing with its 13889 different cursors. More productive, better or worse, but it's intended to attack the same thing.

Voiceover felt refreshing in its early stages because its use of the gestures (both in mac and ios devices) was something we all had been waiting for a long time, but Apple is not updating it with a lot of new features, in part cause if someting works, let it be...

In 2014, you can do more or less the same things with nvda, jaws or Voiceover, the main differences are how to do that, and I think each screen reader has to improve this "how to". A whole revision of jaws could simplify its 3722 cursors, some of its impossible keystrokes and make it faster and lighter; nvda has to simplify a bit its object navegator (using it on a laptop is not the best experience at all), and Voiceover needs a new keyboard layout (don't you feel constantly as you haven't enought fingers to deal with voiceover, specially in your mac?).

My opinion is that all most used screen readers can do the same, but they aren't optimized. For each new release, developers add a little thing to mantain the hipe without looking at the entire product experience. There isn't much more they can add but a better way to do what we all are doing in our everyday lifes (obviously, compatibility with new software releases is a good reason for updating, but I'm not considering it like a new feature).

Finally, I partly agree... jaws offers more productivity in some areas like working with Visual Studio or advanced text processing, it's objectively true. I use jaws at work, NVDA at home and VoiceOver on my phone and on the Mac (musical composition etc), and in my experience, many people  do so, cause each screen reader has its own weaknesses.

Hmmm, Research it which breaks every other week because the underlying web resource changes, place markers?  I believe there is an NVDA add-in that provides them.  Excel row and column headers?  NVDA has those too and they are easy to set up for multiple sheet regions as of the last update.  Word index?  Does anyone use that? 

JFW has one really cool and configurable tool in its skim reading dialogue that NVDA doesn't share.  It also has better specialized scripted support for some programs like Sonar, Skype and now QuickBooks.

So, for some particular users, there is a sufficient case to be made for using JFW.  It's not worth the price tag in my use case even to keep up on the SMA, but I can see the possibility.  But NVDA is a far more robust competitor than you might think, based on the dismissive tone of post 23.