Snippet: Everybody Hates Firefox’s Frequent Updates ☇

Speaking of Mozilla-y things, Jono DiCarlo, a Firefox developer for Mozilla has come to the conclusion that a lot of smart people thought from day one of their version number arms race with Google:

Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn’t want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent.

Ever since Google decided to focus on big version number updates all the time and Mozilla wanted to play catch-up for mind-share, this annoyed people. For comparison (looking at the original launch date and the current stable releases), Safari (2003) is at 5.1.7 Chrome (2008) is at 20; Internet Explorer (1995) is at 9; and Firefox (2004) is at 13. Finally, the best example of avoiding version number inflation is Camino (2002), which is at 2.1.