Up until 3.x, FF was coming out at a regular basis.
But once 4 came out, 5 was quickly following after it and 6 seemed even quicker than that. Now there’s word of 7’s near imminent release.
As much as I love FF, this can’t be productive to web professionals, can it? So many versions getting flooded, each with it’s own abilities. What justified FF’s major version changes so quickly?
It’s an attempt to hide the fact that what was once a nice usable and reliable (do you still know what those adjectives entail, Mozilla?) browser is increasingly being rendered less so.
They’re trying to copy the Chrome release schedule.
IMHO, it should’ve gone from 3.6.x to 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, and to 4.3.
Now mozilla is upping the ante by wanting to have a major release ready every 5 weeks.
Honestly, this is going to hurt firefox adoption in the long run. It had gained recognition as a browser standard in the private and public sectors, but now there are debates at whether or not to abandon it because organizations can’t keep up with testing to make sure proprietary intranet sites and software work properly.
Yeah, I’m sure there are probably some rendering issues and differences between them, even though I’d think they can’t be THAT significant because of how soon the next major version comes out.
We support “common” users who think “IE9 is better than FF3 because 9 is greater than 3”; so I wonder if Mozilla is adopting bigger build versions to “fight” this misnomer. Still. If so, they should have just jumped from FF3 to FF9. Netscape never had a version 5, right?
Surprisingly, I don’t think I’ve encountered that reasoning before.
I tend to think this is at least part of the reason behind the rapid increase in version numbers.
It’s not unreasonable to think that non tech savvy people might think…hmmmmm…:scratch:…IE has had nine versions, FF has had 3 versions…then IE must be more advanced.
The rapid versioning is killing many add-ons too. The developers can’t keep up. It’s sad, but to me this seems like the beginning of the end for FF.