I wish they'd just bump the version number to 30 then save major revision numbers for major revisions. I don't see anything in here that would warrant anything but a bump from 15 to 15.5 under the old Firefox revision standards.
Just because Mozilla has their reason for making the change doesn't mean everyone has to be happy about the change. I'm not complaining about Firefox, I'm complaining about the number, and the corruption of what that number is supposed to mean.
I agree that it's a redefinition of what "version number" means: now it's essentially date based, rather than feature based (though the two are obviously correlated). But I can't see any obvious reason to read "redefinition" as "corruption". It's just different, and both Mozilla and Google had sensible reasons for making that change.
In fact, their decisions may make it worth questioning those assumptions more broadly. Is there a chance that your version numbering method is causing subtle problems for your own development process?
This rapid release schedule is just the most efficient way for these teams to deliver new features in a stable way. Taking 1-2 years to land code in the next major, stable version of the product just isn't practical anymore.
People get way too hung up on the actual number.
Don't be. There will be no "major additions" anymore. They will now release small features, quickly. So no major feature bump. Hence no need to wait for one either. It's like a number of small steps instead of one giant leap.
The point is that Firefox never wants to ever have a "major release" again. Small frequent changes work much better for everybody. So what are their options? Keep incrementing the minor number? The major major number then becomes meaningless and you end up with absurdities like "2.6.39".
I think the solution they chose is much better than the one Linus chose. What's the difference between 2.6.39 and 3.0? About the same as 2.6.38 to 2.6.39, and 3.0 to 3.1. Eventually they'll get up to 3.BIG and he'll call it 4.0 for no particularly reason.
Would you also be one to complain about the Linux kernel versioning scheme? It conveys exactly as much information as Firefox' does and works on the same principle. They just happen to have that extra first "major" number there, but it exists only for compatibility reasons. The change from 2.6.39 to 3.0 was exactly as "major" as pretty much every "point" release since 2.6.0. Yet I don't see people complaining about the version numbers every time a new kernel version is released.