[chrismorgan]

I want to figure out who to talk to on both Firefox and Chrome sides to beg that they adopt a scheme like YYYY.MM.minor for their version numbering. I believe that would be superior for basically everyone—web developers, users, &c. (In the case of Firefox, it works especially well since they’re releasing approximately monthly now. I could imagine people on Chrome puzzling over why some month numbers got skipped—not that people actually look at those numbers often.)

[choward]

I agree. The first thing I think when I see a version is "how old is this?". Version numbers as they are now are completely arbitrary (nobody really follows semantic versioning no matter how hard they try). Might as well encode some useful information into them. I'm thankful a lot of the Linux stuff I use follows this.

[roca]

Releases are almost always date-based, but once in a while a release is delayed. I guess that's a bit easier if the release number is not a date.

[glandium]

There's also the fact that Firefox is now on a 4 weeks release cycle, which means there will be months with two releases. (and that's ignoring chemspill releases)

[afiori]

Then if not year.month they can use year.counter where counter goes from 1 to 14 = ceil(366/28)

[throwaway2048]

i mean, whats the problem with the version going up 2 numbers rather than 1?

[roca]

It's suboptimal to have to change the number of the next release during a release cycle. That would mean, for example, that Firefox Nightly 2020.11 might correspond to a Firefox release 2020.12.

[butz]

Try talking to the guys who keep "improving" location bar. Maybe that will keep them busy for a few releases.

[Tagbert]

What’s the advantage behind a more complex scheme? It doesn’t seem to add anything. The current system just notes the specific release in a series of releases.

[chrismorgan]

Semantics. The main thing that users ever want on seeing a version number is to know when it corresponds to. That’s a bothersome lookup at present.

[joaomsa]

Might affect (dumb) uses that rely on the current increasing version number scheme in user agent strings and package/deployment scripts.

[chrismorgan]

User agent strings are progressively being frozen, so that shouldn’t affect anything.

[clairity]

if you strip out the periods, it’s still an increasing numbering scheme, assuming there’s fewer than 10 minor releases in a month, which seems highly likely.

[Ayesh]

Aw yes, the Ubuntu style.