Firefox 5 Should have been Firefox 4.02!

Chrome releases way too many version numbers for the actual visible progress they make. Only difference is they have been doing it forever.

Really makes me kinda sad that Mozilla is catering to the lowest common denominator by caving to releasing higher version numbers to make people think they have made more progress.

~Jeff

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What's worse is their ceasing support for the previous version prematurely.

[/serious]

YBT

Bah.

Personally, the complaints about the version numbering seem about as pointless to me as the complaints about "this project's name is, like, totally stupid!"

No doubt it'll confuse people at first, but I'm not otherwise seeing how calling Firefox 4.1 "Firefox 5" is a substantial material change.

Actually Firefox5 finally answered my prayer, fix the embedded media codecs, now it can playback medias within the browsers again. Not a big deal for me, but for my dad who listen to online radio. That was a huge problem in FF4. But it should had been FF4.2.

nah, it needed to be 5.

Look at it from mozilla's perspective...they switched development models and they updated the entire engine as well as WebGL in it.

Bottom line, it was a HUGE change for them. Bring on FF5!

It was a bit of a pain, a few weeks after changing my repos in Debian to run FF4, to have to do it again for FF5, but hopefully things will hold for a while now.

I already dumped Debian Squeeze's Chromium for Chrome from the Google repo. The way-old Chromium in Squeeze had a lot of issues with sites I needed to work with.

Google doesn't seem to want end users to pay much attention to version numbers. They just silently update the app as things go along. Not exactly the Linux-distro philosophy, but as long as it works, I'm going to look the other way.

I'm getting very comfortable with "stable base, newer apps," and that especially applies to the Firefox and Chrome/Chromium web browsers.

@Steven FF6 and FF7 are suppose to be out by the end of the year.

I think that in the long run (and maybe the short run, too) Mozilla would get significantly more mileage out of a clear and well-stated policy (call it "marketing", if you like) that Mozilla's Firefox version-numbering actually means something.

Credibility and reputation may be intangibles, but they really do count for something -- especially when you're competing against huge, highly visible and well-regarded companies like Google, and huge monopolies like Microsoft.

Otherwise, how long will it be before Mozilla finds itself in a bind, because they're faced with the embarrassing (or at least stale and boring) task of promoting Firefox version 40-whatever, as something "NEW" and exciting?...

Quoting:Chrome releases way too many version numbers for the actual visible progress they make. Only difference is they have been doing it forever.

I agree, they seem to be coming so fast as to be daily at times. I don't mind updates as long as they don't break half or all of my extensions/addons which Firefox always seemed to do.

What hooked me on Chrome was being able to pull a tab out into its own window when I found something I wanted to look at later and has evolved into pulling tabs into other windows grouped by interest or search. I sometimes have two or three windows with upwards of a dozen tabs each and open for hours at a time on my desktop, all without crashing.

I love Firefox, trust me. I'm one of those people that helped buy the one page ad in the NYT and being able to use it at my 'day' job instead of IE is a gift that never gets old. But Chrome fit me like a glove for some reason. When it came out I downloaded it and tried it out, and about a month later I realized I hadn't opened up Firefox..in like a month.