Dear Mozilla. Why do you keep doing all these full version releases? Seriously it's just annoying.
Just because IE is on version 10. Doesn't mean you have to be.
Why are you doing this....
You've gone from 3-8 in a year. That's not right.
The corrollary to this being that releases are no longer news.
I believe the main reason for both projects doing it are allowing them to get improvements and new features to users faster. One or two releases a year means a very long time before improvements get to users, and it holds everything back. 6-week releases means you get improvements to users in just a few months.
Of course there are downsides to 6-week releases. If you prefer a slower-updating browser, there are other good options, such as Opera. And if you want even more stability, there are Safari and IE, which these days are quite good as well.
With the rapid release cycle, when features start development, they have the ability to be easily configured out of the release product if they aren't ready for a particular version. We have a reliable release schedule that we expect to hit every 6 weeks. Obviously, we do our best to have as many new features as are ready be part of each release, but we don't leave people wondering when it will finally happen because we keep to the schedule and release the features that are ready.
Some of the biggest parts of this release were actually groundwork improvements to make the add-ons ecosphere more comfortable in the context of rapid release.
It also was more wrong to stay on 3.6.* for over two years.
A middle road might be to start a year with a full release and then do point-releases doing that year, so in 2013 we would have, for instance: 13, 13.0.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.2.1, 13.3.
I think simple dated releases would be an improvement (e.g., Firefox 2011.1, 2011.2, etc., or tag them based on month, this one being 2011.10, or 2011v2 or whatever.) But that's basically just a PR move. There's no longer anything really like a point release except in the case of regressions that demand an immediate fix (as happened with Firefox 7).
The application also uses jQuery 1.2.6 (released May '08) - I guess I'll be the one to QA the migration to the present day.
Hence I am not yet a believer in "latest version is the greatest version", in all cases. In principle, yes, but there are exceptions that makes version numbers necessary.
"The version number is too high" is one complaint.
"I have compatibility issues across releases" is another. They are not the same. They are not interchangeable.
What happened here perfectly exemplifies what happens every time a release is brought up. One of these complaints is brought up, then in the next breath it's switched to the other, as if we're still discussing the same thing.
We are not.
Conflating the two by bouncing between them multiple times in a discussion, every time the discussion occurs results in massive, unproductive churn.
The biggest problem with updates are regressions. Since Firefox uses four release channels (since the introduction of the Aurora channel), most features get a decent amount of testing before being introduced to stable.
the reason behind going to full numbers is that if you don't have the latest version, you have the wrong version. if there is a 13.1 and a 13.2, it makes it seem like people using 13.1 are still using the latest version. they aren't.