That's one thing that i would like to know too since i dumped Firefox sometime ago. Constant update with just minor tweaks annoy me, such as Realtek driver and Google Chrome.

Some extensions are hard-coded to FF version numbers. Yes, they shouldn't be doing that, but they are, so an increment in the version number breaks those extensions.

Your name is just text.

But it has a significant meaning. Exactly what Firefox's version numbers used to have (major, minor and revision releases). Now it's just "we changed something".

... "yeah, the only thing we changed was the number, but hey, it's a change"

Even Torvalds had a better reason for bumping the Linux to 3.0, celebrating the 20-year-old kernel.

Fuck yeah, it is. It seems like almost once a week I get a new FF update that drives me crazy until I finally relent and download it. On top of that, if you run a lot of extensions or Greasemonkey scripts, FF becomes a freaking resource hog and bogs down here and there. I'm almost tempted to switch to Chrome or something.

I'm interested at Chrome too, but i read there are lot of privacy issue with that browser so i opted for IronBrowser or Comodo Dragon. These two seems very stable right now compared to last year and support almost all extension on Chrome library.

It's a good thing. Yes it's moving crazy fast but so is the web right now. This is also a good thing.

In the old days we never would have had a new version of HTML because of legacy browsers. Javascript is becoming critical to the modern web, and old interpreters aren't going to cut it anymore. Things like WebGL, the canvas and WebSockets are going to change the way you work using a browser in a year or two instead of a decade.

Of course, extension developers still need to get on board and write with a longer future in mind, not hardcoding arbitrary version numbers in their code.

If it still really bothers you, imagine a "4." in front of the version number. Happy again!

Bit off topic here, but the 2.6.x.y scheme was awful, as the later kernels were so removed from the original 2.6 that the 2.6 portion of the number was essentially meaningless. They should have changed it to 3.x.y as soon as they decided to change the numbering scheme.

Bah, politics. I say, lock the browsers onto a room full of rusted forks and see which one comes out alive.

Now see here: in an adventuring party, all classes are needed. You have Firefox, the huge beefy fighter with a fuckton of weaapons and armor to choose from. You have Chrome, the nimble and sneaky thief getting twice or thrice as many attacks per second as anyone else. There's Safari, the bard, does a little bit of everything but excells at nothing. There's Explorer, the wizard, speaking in riddles about old scriptures and whom no one understands the mind of - also very much useless in a hand-to-hand fight. Finally we have Opera, the cleric, though divine and arcane magic are very different domains, she has come to recognise a scant few words of the wizard's inane ramblings and tries to interpret them together with the decisions of the rest of the group, likely with confusing results.

Then there's the player character (the web developer), who can choose either of these classes, and even mix and match to some extent.

Without this group of adventurers, the web would not be anywhere near what we have today.

Then there's Lynx. It just doesn't give a damn.

Firefox just seems to be getting slower and slower for me. So I can understand you wanting to stay put. I switched to Dragon and it's a hell of a lot faster and it has all the features I want. I recommend you give it a try if you're fed up with the way FF's going.

Internet Explorer also slows the party's advancement fourfold, and, when asked questions, usually comes up with deceivingly wrong answers. You have to speak to him in a completely unique grammar, using exceptions and parentheses for every statement. He never entered the dungeon, the dungeon was created with him in it. For some reason, the crowd of onlookers seem to favor him, although that's changing quickly. He still brags about defeating "the great Mozilla". These stories annoy Firefox.

I use Chrome on my laptop and Firefox on my desktop, for comparison. Chrome does seem faster, but it has a couple of disadvantages compared to Firefox. It doesn't use a separate process name for its plugins, so if a website starts screwing up Flash or something, you're basically guessing if you want to kill it in Task Manager. Also, the customization and such are pretty minimal. The Settings page, even on "advanced," is very very sparse.

And when using the search function, you can't specify to "match case." That right there is almost a deal-breaker for me. It makes searching for short words MUCH more tedious than it needs to be.

However, Firefox racing through version numbers is a little worrying, but from what I can tell there's not really any major difference between 4.0 and 8.0, at least not to the degree that 4.0 was from 3.6.

8 is definitely an improvement over 7. Not by much, but at least, Firefox didn't get slower in this release. Try clearing out the cache / history / stuff.