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Such a quick jump in major version usually indicates a deep code quality problem. Are we asking the right questions here?

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The quick jump in major version is because Mozilla is moving to a rapid release cycle, a la Google Chrome. Firefox 6 and Firefox 7 are expected by the end of the year. Here is one of the relevant blog posts:

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/04/13/new-channels-for-fir...

That blog post is almost entirely devoid of content.

And ticking though version numbers that quickly is a bad idea. There are better ways for Mozilla to go about this...

The major benchmark for browsers has been Internet Explorer, which has had 9 versions in 16 years. Compare that to Google Chrome, which is already on 14.0.803.0 (dev) / 13.0.782.32 (beta) / 12.0.742.100 (stable) after existing for less than three years. Mozilla is moving away from Microsoft's release model and towards Google's release model. While the current timeline for Firefox is a major release every three months, the target timeline is for a major release every six weeks.

Technology gets faster. Version numbers are arbitrary. Mozilla will be fine.

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