Firefox you’re doing it wrong, please stop.
Firefox just told me the it’s ready for upgrade to 6.0, I’ve only just upgraded to 5.0, and guys I know are still on 3.x. Are they really re-writing all of the code? I doubt it. Is it just to keep up with Chrome? I suspect. Just because chrome are running at a major version a week or some other equally stupid versioning system doesn’t mean Firefox needs to.
Software versioning takes usually two forms, 0.x.x in the free software world, where a 1.0 release is viewed as perfect, and in the commercial environment, X.x (1.0 or 1.1) where major revisions are the largest number. Major version updates say a 1.1 to 2.0 usually indicate some major upgrade of the software, either GUI or internal. Long standing software such as BBedit is on version 10, first released in April of 1992, it stands at the expected major version a year.
Of course versioning doesn’t have to stand by this, TeX the typesetting system have a version number that is tending towards Pi, with all bugs being fixed as features upon the author Donal Knuths death. So exceptions are made, but TeX is a fairly geek orientated system, all my CS papers had to be submitted in TeX to save the lecturers the horror of Word documents.
Maybe people are switching to Chrome for other reasons than the fact that they appear to be releasing a new major version every 6 weeks.
Chrome is running on a major version update once every 6 weeks or so, but the beauty of chrome is that it’s silent and quiet, doesn’t interrupt the user. Google being the law unto themselves has decided on this major version system, and thats ok, because they hide it very well, most users aren’t bothered by it, or could find it if you asked them.
Firefox updates on the other hand, are of the most obnoxious variety intrusive, inconvenient, and obstructive. It forces the user to make a choice to upgrade, forces the user to stop browsing then insists on taking a very long time to upgrade. Most intrusive.
Once upgraded it disables most the plugins as they are not yet compatible, thats the real catch, with the auto disable of all plugins till they are compatible I’m left with a version of firefox that basically doesn’t work for me. Most plugin development teams aren’t up to speed with releasing new versions of their plugins every month just to stay compatible, and why should they if their work is stable? This level of testing creates a large extra workload for developers that some just will not be able to keep up with. Why is this bad? If firebug doesn’t work on my Firefox, I’m not going to be using Firefox, simple. I don’t use Firefox as a browser I use it as a debugger. This means that I’ll not be upgrading by default to the latest version of Firefox every month, as it will break my workflow and become more of a hinderance than a help, as well as becoming a security hazard on my computer.
It’s going to keep on going too, 7.0 is set to hit the webs on September 27th, 8.0 moves into beta on September 27th and I’ll assume hits the upgrade centre late October. Mozilla is it really necessary to do this? Is it really necessary to make users upgrade once a month? Is it really necessary to switch to a major point release just because Chrome is doing it?
Maybe people are switching to Chrome for other reasons than the fact that they appear to be releasing a new major version every 6 weeks.