Considering the whole reason they're doing this crap is to make it look like they're keeping up to date with Chrome, yeah, it kinda does make a difference.
Methinks they don't understand the concept of "Major release.minor release"
The reason they are doing this is to get updates out to users faster not slower.
Look at the memory changes from 4->8, they're putting in updates little by little. The train station model of development fits web browsers much better than prolonged giant version leaps that change almost everything.
That's not why they are doing it. It's because it's better for everyone if things like browsers are essentially versionless, and everyone is on the newest version. Immediate automatic updates mean that users are always able to access the newest features.
That's an awfully subjective position to take. I don't have a problem with rapid release, but I have a problem with passing off minor revisions and bugfixes as major releases.
And try to tell me the version doesn't matter when there's a regression or otherwise something broken on a newer rev that works fine on an older one.
I don't know where this recent trend of "version numbers are evil" came from, but it's entirely silly.
Is it really silly? Gmail doesn't have version numbers. Facebook doesn't have version numbers. Hacker News doesn't have version numbers. Twitter doesn't have version numbers. They may refer to "the new version" or "the new, beta version" but not by number.
On the dev side, you might refer to a particular code snapshot with a "version number" that might as well be 3.2 or r304 or "2011-08-3 12:03:47" or d1b119d8f117b16fcfa58b2be60df87a6c45ac58. Considering the nightmares caused by conservative IT groups enforcing version X of software Y for years, eliminating version numbers from the public for something as critical as a browser seems like a good move to me on security alone. For other things the formal major.minor.release-revision can still make sense. Personally I miss the "even minor version represents stable, odd unstable" pattern that's increasingly fallen out of use.
>Is it really silly? Gmail doesn't have version numbers. Facebook doesn't have version numbers. Hacker News doesn't have version numbers. Twitter doesn't have version numbers.
Web apps and installed programs are completely different animals.
Actually, they understand it quite well; fixes to released versions of Firefox use dotted version numbers like that. Mozilla just switched from doing major releases on a timescale of 1-2 years to doing major releases many times per year.
Among other things, that has improved the quality of the browser, since features don't have to rush to meet the release deadline when they can just wait for the next one right around the corner.
But nothing has really changed, except what they refer to each release as.
I've always been a fan of this definition:
A minor release contains bugs fixes and minor feature changes (For example, 1.0 to 1.1). Major releases include major functionality and feature enhancements (e.g. 1.x to 2.0).
The problem comes in that they're releasing minor bugfixes and patches as major releases, for no other reason than to compete on the numbers system.
I don't think the answer is "abolish the numbers", I think the answer is "be honest".
Methinks they don't understand the concept of "Major release.minor release"