Chrome: Playing the browser game for keeps
saffer.posterous.com
saffer.posterous.com
These are all admirable goals and Chrome's versioning is just a side effect of newer software development methods. Chrome is perhaps on track to win the browser wars because it's the best browser and gets new features the fastest; IE's release cycle is still humiliatingly slow.
One part is, I guess, the seamless upgrading (when I use Firefox, I usually click on "upgrade next time", because I am always doing something TOTALLY important that can't wait). Other part is that the extensions don't break every new version and the UI looks completely the same (unlike for, let's say, Opera, which changes UI all the time). I don't know what browser version am I using, and I don't care.
Really, I hope this will become standard in OS, too.
Woo!
Or reassuringly stable if you are supporting an enterprise. Given Google's planned abandonment of support for older browser versions in their applications, there may be a ready market for a more stable browser platform.
If you are a admin for a large site, this is useful: http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer...
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
Unlike previous number races, Chrome's rapidly increasing version numbers do not indicate a will to impress consumers with high values. Instead, Chrome takes a page from web applications, and makes the version number irrelevant to the vast majority of its users.
Firefox seems to be trying to do the same, but IMO it's putting the cart before the horse. It should improve its update mechanism until version numbers do not matter, and then update the major version as often as it wants to.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure this is true of every browser. And most software in general.
Marketing people like having a number. Developers like having a number. They like it for different reasons and have different goals for it. But users have never really known or cared.
People really need to learn what anti-trust is and what it isn't. My goodness, the label gets applied to everything.
Regarding anti-trust: Anti-trust laws are laws that are intended to prevent monopolistic measures. I posit in the article that by controlling both the client (chrome) and server (Google Docs, in addition to GMail, Google Search, et al) that Google is in a unique position to perform monopolistic actions. I'm not the only one that thinks Google may be doing something nefarious either - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/ftc-launchin... .
When z is increased, that is the developers way of saying that "this is the least dramatic update we will make available to end users". Alternatively, an increment of a is a sign that "this is the most dramatic alteration in functionality we will make".
I think that part of the trend toward higher version numbers isn't just about having nice big numbers, but rather a reflection of changes in development methodology. Whether you attribute it to DVCSs or simple changes in developer culture, it seems clear that the "biggest possible" update has significantly shrunk in size lately.
Look, google doesn't advertise version number revs, and updates happen invisibly behind the scenes. Figuring out the chrome version number takes effort, as there is no rebranding on a major version number bump. Chrome uses the major version number for engineering reasons and uses a continuous deployment method. Certainly other developers may make a bigger deal of major version revs (often tying them to a product updates requiring new purchases) but that shouldn't affect anyone's judgment of chrome's versioning. They could jump to version a million by now, nobody should care much.