Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

Posted Mar 10, 2011 3:36 UTC (Thu) by Sufrostico (guest, #68053)
Parent article: Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

To me this is just a marketing strategy.

- Google Chrome is version 10
- Mozilla Firefox is version 3.6

They want to reach the same numbers of Google Chrome. To Developers is non-sense but for most windows end users, numbers (not even features) matters.

Kind off the same thing that Slackware did years ago (Jump some version numbers just for marketing).

Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

Posted Mar 10, 2011 14:14 UTC (Thu) by bryanlarsen (guest, #26230) [Link]

That doesn't seem to be the game that Google is playing. How many users actually know what version of Chrome they're running? It auto-updates in the background pretty much silently. Google probably wants to make it as much like gmail as possible -- do you know what version of gmail you're running?

It's also the same model the Linux kernel uses. Given that the 3rd number is the only significant one these days, we might as well call the latest linux kernel "38.rc8".

So no, I don't think it's marketing -- I think it's just good engineering. Using the Linux kernel as your model for release cycles is probably not a bad idea for most projects.

Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

Posted Mar 10, 2011 15:02 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (5 responses)

"To me this is just a marketing strategy."

It is not, at least not in the sense that you're suggesting. Firefox does not make an inordinate fuss over its version numbers - pretty much only to the extent required to encourage people to upgrade quickly. Google does not make much of a fuss about version numbers at all.

It is a strategy to compete with Google Chrome by rolling features out much more quickly. If you've lived with the stable Firefox release 3.6 through its lifecycle, rather than upgrading to the betas for 4.0, you've had the same feature set for close to a year. Chrome users, on the other hand, have continued to get new features on a regular basis.

Firefox is trying to change that and match Chrome's development style by pushing updates out more quickly.

Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

Posted Mar 11, 2011 15:30 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link] (4 responses)

Then why not go with 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 instead of 5, 6 and 7? If it doesn't matter and users don't care and it's not about marketing how about continuing a practice that makes sense and makes me happy?

Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

Posted Mar 11, 2011 22:15 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I say they want to catch up with Internet Explorer, which is around version 9 these days.

Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

Posted Mar 14, 2011 10:00 UTC (Mon) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (2 responses)

And end up like the Linux kernel, at (for example) 4.38, without a reason to bump the major number ever again? In the world of "cadence" and incremental updates the <major>.<minor>.<micro> versioning scheme is more and more obsolete.

Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

Posted Mar 14, 2011 13:49 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

I'd call it less(1) and less(1) obsolete. (What's that at now? Version 441?)

Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

Posted Mar 14, 2011 14:02 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

less-418 was released on January 8, 2008.