Some Clarification and Musings

If I said "the firefox project has 6000 open bugs" would that have been better?

Now realize that's just semantics.

For the record I am a diehard firefox user, 6000 bugs or not.

Right, and not all of the "in-progress" features get shipped in each release. Each release only ships the parts that are ready. That way, users get the benefit of new, finished features without having to wait for thousands of bugs in unrelated parts of the code to be fixed first.

Funny, that. I have been hearing the opposite kind of signs and news :)

I guess it's a matter of perspective (and of which HN headlines attract your attention :) )

As pointed out in a different comment, Chrome has over four times as many open bug reports.

What examples from the Mozilla camp not been good?

I was considering moving from Firefox to Chrome, but with Firefox's recent performance improvements, I no longer see any reason to. The one benefit which Chrome had (performance), I no longer see. I like that Chrome exists, because it pushes Firefox to be better.

Which is only natural. I don't expect fixes for Firefox 2 anymore.

Sometimes, yes.

The reason Firefox keeps changing major version numbers is that they no longer guarantee binary or source compatibility for extensions from one release to the next. Since the releases are much closer together, there's less chance that any particular addon will be affected by the changes between version X and version X+1, but there's a much higher chance of addons being effected than, say, in any given six-week period during the reign of Firefox 3.6.

Please tell me you are making the exact same post about Chrome's version inflation? "Political Reasons"? please elaborate. Mozilla announced months ago that it was not using version numbers for marketing purposes and they announced recently that they are doing away with version numbers completely, so I fail to see what the "political reasons" might be.

I thought the goal was to motivate users and IT organizations to stay current. This frees up Mozilla developers from fixing bugs in N many different old versions of Firefox.

To me, the reasoning behind the change in version is pretty clear. Especially looking at the disaster that was IE6. As soon as there is any support for old versions some IT department somewhere will immediately decide it's time to freeze their version. Moving forward after making a freeze like this becomes very difficult (that has been my experience). This presents two options 1) It's their own problem and move on or 2) Continue to patch old versions. The issue with patching old versions is bad IT decisions end up costing Mozilla time. Meanwhile chrome just continues chugging along at full speed only supporting current.

The current linux distro versioning and support structure seems to map well to this problem. Ubuntu, for instance, has LTS versions that IT can stick with and are patched for X many years.

Windows users update their anti-virus software and definitions in near real-time. Operating Systems update near real-time... why not browsers. I now use chrome most of the time and I am (surprisingly) happy with their versioning. I was a naysayer when they first started too.

"I would have much less of a problem with rapid release if they'd stop changing major version numbers"

They're going to stop having any version numbers.