[lucb1e]

Firefox 3: Yay!

Firefox 3.6: Let's see what's new!

Firefox 4: oooh pretty UI (at least that's what most thought)

Firefox 26: sigh another one?

I think only every 10 versions should be news. Since they moved to this useless release cycle (basically replacing bugfix releases with major releases), we should shift our news upvoting from major releases to major-major releases (i.e. treat the decimal sign as if it were 2.6x instead of 26.x).

[sp332]

The Firefox release is on a schedule. There's a new version every 6 weeks. Whatever features are ready to go are included. Sometimes they are big features and sometimes not. This one has some pretty major changes, that's why it's news.

[nine_k]

For me personally FF 26 adds a major feature, specifically h.264 video playback in Linux. Finally I'll stop needing Flash to view videos on Vimeo (and a few other sites).

[shmerl]

It actually was already available in 25, it was just off by default.

[acdha]

> I think only every 10 versions should be news

Numbers aren't intrinsically important – what would be really nice is saving the announcements for specific features of note.

[lucb1e]

> Numbers aren't intrinsically important

True, so yeah I stand corrected about that. Now, can we tell Mozilla this and get off this ridicul^H^H^Hrapid release cycle?

[acdha]

This release cycle is great: it's not quite as fast as Chrome but it means that I can start using features for 90+% of the Firefox-using public within months of release rather than years.

[PavlovsCat]

Well, the version numbering system has no bearing on the frequency of updates

Still, I don't see the difference between 1.0/1.01/1.02 and 1.0/2.0/3.0 -- it's still "3 versions". I say version numbers are bullshit, codenames doubly so.. just make it the release date or build number and be done with it. Automate it, and let no human ever think about it again. It's just an identifier for a specific changelog entry after all, and has no meaning by itself.

[acdha]

That's why I said “release cycle” – moving from numbers to “when it's ready” was definitely the key part. The trick was breaking the tyranny of significant numbers where people would hold off until they had enough features to be worthy of a major release.

[pygy_]

Updates are automatic, and understated in the UI.

Version numbers are still useful as literal milestones (well, allmost... it would be 6-weeks-stones, but no such thing exists).

[shock]

I actually prefer it this way rather than a big code drop every couple years.