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Comment by NanoWar | Hacker News Reader

How come I use Firefox 3.6 and there is already a version 8? Man, things go fast...

Where have you been? The Firefox version scheme changes have been talked about almost every day here for the last few months.

Doesn't seem to feel right. They could have gone with 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, etc, and expectations would be better managed.

Until they got to 4.39 and people would have the opposite complaint.

Do you know which version is the current one for Google Chrome? Me neither.

That's the point - it works and I don't really care which version number I am running as long as it works.

I don't use chrome much, but have a decade or two of experience with point releases delivering significant features. Hence the dissonance.

Just wait until people start talking about IE 26, Firefox 34, Chrome 42, etc. Now that even the Linux kernel is jumping onto the inflated-version-numbers bandwagon, it won't be long.

Hopefully they switch to Roman numerals soon.

Then maybe a few decades down the line they'll reboot the series and go back to just "Firefox" like they did with the Star Trek films.

Why would anyone use a year and a half old browser? Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all have free updated versions of their fine browsers.

Not everyone lives on the bleeding edge. For instance, my laptop runs Ubuntu 10.10, which still uses 3.6 by default. Even though it is pretty trivial to add the Mozilla PPA, I don't feel that the new features of 4 or 5 are important enough to switch to them before I upgrade my OS.

I'm starting to see from this perspective. I switched to Firefox 4 on release day, which was great. I did the same with FF 5. On my Windows boot, I've seen way more crashes with FF5 than I did with FF4. I also see some crashes on FF5/Ubuntu, whereas I saw none on FF4/Ubuntu.

You need to update to Firefox 5, the latest stable version. There are no security updates for Firefox 3.6.

There are no security updates for Firefox 3.6.

There is already and it will continue for a while.

My mistake. I thought when they announced there wouldn't be security updates for Firefox 4 that Firefox 3.6 was included as well. It turns out there is a Firefox 3.6 update planned for August 2011, but the prospect for updates beyond that is hazy.

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