[hello_asdf]

I really don't care for Firefox's new versioning scheme. I'm still on Firefox 10 on Gentoo, and I don't feel much of a reason to upgrade. I felt that incrementing that number should be reserved for major changes. I didn't intend for this to be taken as a complaint about the Mozilla development team. It's just something I've found unusual in the development community. It's been confusing me, and I never understood their reasoning behind it.

[keeperofdakeys]

Major changes are occurring, especially regarding memory usage (and security bugs, so I seriously suggest you upgrade). Your main gripe is there isn't very many of them at each release, since they have changed development style. This kind of development style is what I'd call rolling release, "ship changes when they are ready", instead of the usual "ship changes in the next version". The classic version numbering fails with this kind of development style, since the differences between major/minor start to fall apart. Look at something like the linux kernel, which follows a rather similar system. Every new version adds major features, just not very many, but they build up over time. In fact, the major-minor meaning was so useless Linus could just change the version from 2.6 to 3 without any significant changes.

As a gentoo user, I would expect you to be very familiar with the rolling release paradigm. Personally I think it works well for something like Firefox. I'm pretty sure I'm getting way more major features per unit of time now then before, since the waiting time between releases was so long. There are definitely some disadvantages to this approach though, but the advantages are worth it.

[hello_asdf]

Thank you for the detailed explanation of it. That's actually kind of fitting for them to do away with major/minor versions. I like the idea that they implement major changes quickly, and I'm currently compiling the latest Firefox.

[SquareWheel]

Does it really matter though? It's an arbitrary number, and incrementing the major version just sets a clearer goal for each release cycle.

[hello_asdf]

No it really doesn't matter. It wasn't so much a complaint, and I didn't intend for it to seem that way. I just didn't understand the reasoning behind it. It's not something that I dislike about the Mozilla team. Just something that is unusual in the development community.

[BCM43]

I don't feel much of a reason to upgrade.

Security updates? IIRC they are not releasing security updates for non-current versions.

[hello_asdf]

Perhaps, I hadn't thought that any significant security issues had been found in recent versions. Are there any I should be concerned about? If not, my reasoning is that I don't want to break what is working perfectly fine for me as is.

After looking at https://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firef... there doesn't seem that there are any to be concerned about. However, in case you are right, I'm recompiling a more recent version of Firefox.

[gcp]

Vulnerability can be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing.

There's several of those. They're also fixed in the ESR (10.x) releases.