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Comment by mrchess | Hacker News Reader

Stop versioning Firefox so rapidly and people will come back. Firefox 5 - Firefox 11 in 1 year. Come on Mozilla... switch back to minor version numbers. I don't think they realize how this perception negatively effects the regular consumer.

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Actually, the "regular consumer" has no idea that Firefox even had version numbers to begin with. Iterating quickly with nearly automatic updates was a huge step in the right direction.

I disagree. There are plenty of people who actually really pay attention to version numbers. Maybe they aren't in the majority, but I've encountered plenty of people who proudly tell me that they have 'the latest version x' before telling me off for sticking with the older version.

I've stopped explaining the memory management and other issues to these kinds of people.

I have to wonder if that isn't actually going to be a problem from now on, not a technical one but a marketing problem. Major version upgrades used to be a big deal and brought lots of publicity even outside narrow tech circles. Now they aren't going to get that for free. Google pushes Chrome a lot in ads, Firefox don't have that. So what are they going to do to spread the word?

You know, lots of software have updates like that. They just don't tell you. Chrome came out in 2008 and it's already at version 17. Firefox came out in 2004 and it's only version 11. Mozilla just needs to make updating more seamless, which I believe they are working on.

Exactly. Chrome has gone from 10-17 in a year but it still "Chrome", not Chrome 17.

So the complaint is that Firefox tells you what version it is as opposed to Firefox having new versions on a timely basis? That doesn't make any sense.

I don't understand. Why do you care what the version number is?

Also according to their release schedule, the updates are soon going to be background (silent) updates. So version numbers will matter less and less.

Mozilla has upped it's game and I have started to see that memory usage is now quite competitive to Chrome.

I never understood the memory usage argument. In my experience, Chrome was always more of a memory drain than Firefox.

Regular consumers really don't care about version numbers. They probably don't even know which version of Office they have installed, let alone their web browser.

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