The idea is that Mozilla can concentrate more developer power into the newest version, getting features faster into a finished product, which might be kind of unstable but very advanced. They don't want to divert resources for supporting older versions, maybe they just don't have them. In order to do so, they advance in major versions, so it's clearer to end support for older major versions. However it's only a number. They could as well call it 4.4 and announce ending of support for <4.4.

End users should mostly be fine with it. Come on, also Steam updates frequently.

But add-on developers or businesses which rely more on stability have many problems with it. They need long term support, otherwise they will not support platfforms. Speed is not important for them.

A better balance might be appropriate. Something like Ubuntu's 6 month cycle and every 2 years a long term supported version.

Here a quote displaying the problem:
"I have 500,000 corporate users on Firefox 3.6. We just completing a test cycle of Firefox 4 on many thousands of internal business web applications. Many hundreds of application owners and their test teams have participated. We gave them several months to ready themselves. We worked with dozens of internal Add-On developers and product teams to prepare their add-ons for Firefox 4. We're poised to deploy Firefox 4.01 in 3Q when the corporate change freeze lifts...The Firefox 4 EOL [end of life schedule] is a kick in the stomach. I'm now in the terrible position of choosing to deploy a Firefox 4 release with potentially unpatched vulnerabilities, reset the test cycle for thousands of internal apps to validate Firefox 5 or stay on a patched Firefox 3.6.x. By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won't go EOL when Firefox 6 is released? "
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20074590-264/rapid-release-firefox-meets-corporate-backlash/

As for the speed, let's see if there are any good comparisons out there:
Here is one: http://lifehacker.com/5844150/browser-speed-tests-firefox-7-chrome-14-internet-explorer-9-and-more

Opera seems to be best on boot up and tab loading while Firefox 7 seems to be good with memory and Chrome seems to be best for javascript/speed.

There is absolutely no way that Firefox 7 is faster than IE or Chrome. Did they really test this, or just made up the numbers? How the fuck can Chrome take 6+ seconds and IE take 10+ seconds to start?

I call this crap.

Random guess: by moving the numbers up faster, people will be reminded to keep their FF up to date.

You know, I thought being at version 8.0 already was kind of odd...

Well i updated from 3.6 to 8 sometime ago since it did have an update that reduced it usage by 50% and also allowed you to choose the option 'Tell websites i do not want to be tracked'. Not to mention Adblock Plus, Noscript, Ghostery and WOT.

Why anyone in the world uses Google Chrome is beyond me. Seriously it's spyware they collect information on you and monitor what websites you go on and such. Do you REALLY feel safe having a browser doing that to you? If you say 'I don't care i have nothing to hide' you are the problem, you are the reason they continue to get away with doing stuff like that.

Honestly it's as bad as Gamers saying they don't care they have to pay for DLC, if you just accept it, it will continue to happen and other companys will follow what they are doing because they can get away with it.

They always mean cold start, i.e. not started before. However it's kind of large numbers. IE takes 2-3 seconds here. However I don't think that they completely make up the numbers.

Maybe someone wants to install all recent browsers freshly without any extension/plugins and perform a test like http://clients.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/index.action as well as some memory tests (loading the same 5 sites with all browsers). Maybe there is also a tool out there that can measure startup time. (I found this one: http://www.passmark.com/products/apptimer.htm) All on the very same system.

Then we had some kind of experimental first hand values.

If this helps, you should be able to grab the older versions of FF here:

http://filehippo.com/download_firefox/

I think they're trying to catch up with IE on V9 or they think people will think IE is better because its a BIGAH NUMBAH!

So you're blaming FF slowness because you have a ton of extensions AND greasemonkey running? I think you're barking up the wrong tree there. That's like saying your Ferrari is slow because of the solid gold statue welded to the spoiler.

Slower? I keep hearing people saying that it's slower and that it uses more RAM, but none of the other browsers is capable of having 30+ tabs full of images and stuff open at once without using more than a gig of RAM.

As for speed, I haven't noticed it and it doesn't show up in any of the benchmarks to an appreciable degree. Ultimately the modest slow down is more than worth it to have a more full featured browser.

OTOH, I really wish they would do something about the random lock ups that seem to happen on Linux and Win 7, never had that on XP.
That's a good point, and while he's at it, vacuum places should really help as well. The places DB has a tendency to get bloated over time and that can have an impact on performance.
That should be less of a problem as more and more extension authors move to jetpack out of sure annoyance with having to constantly update their plug ins. I think that's probably the real motivation.

Hahaha Firefox...

At work we have spent the last 6 months developing our systems to work in firefox7 we finally succeeded (no lie) November 4th, so everything worked for less then a week before 8 came along and messed it all up again.

Define systems; if your systems are websites which broke in the transition from 7 to 8 then your whole dev team is filled with incompetent people, simple as that.

They're doing that to imitate Google Chrome. Now what version number has to do with quality, no one could answer. Instead of making it a better browser, now they focus on incrementing version number instead. It's a trend.

the words: the, choir,preaching, to. come to mind.

Our dev team are akin to the 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters. If they do something correctly they did it by accident.

That was freaking annoying... Had it happening like every 10-15 minutes with v7. But hey, after the v8 update, it is not happening anymore. They seem to have fixed something. (on Windows 7)
Using standard coding practices, websites / system should not get broken by browser updates. Since 8 didn't change previously released stuff, and just added new HTML5 / CSS3 features, I find it really that surprising that your system got messed up by it.

If your devs keep this screwing up trend, change the platform... develop for IE, at least it doesn't get small incremental features updates and it won't screw up your stuff (an update should not if the coding was done properly, since the features currently implemented in browsers rarely get drastically changed along the way). v9 is going to be supported until 2020 with security updates, so you have your secure needs covered up.