YES! I have never been happier with my switch to Chrome.
I'm actually quite frustrated with myself for having put my friends and family on Firefox as it's constantly needing updates, getting new versions, changing its look, etc.
It's more frustrating than dealing with IE now.
Mozilla's game of "look how fast we are moving" is absolutely frustrating and painful.
I can just click my "About Chrome" link now, and it says it's up to date. How refreshing.
EDIT: All a Firefox update means to me anymore is that my plugins won't work anymore so I need to stick with an outdated, probably less secure, and slower Firefox version.
Just downloaded Firefox 6. Umm... I don't have benchmark software to test internal improvements, but I don't really feel like any difference. Probably because Firefox 5 is already fast enough for me. But Xmarks addon is broken now, and I experienced some issues with trying to install some of the add-ons. Everything else is fine.
This is my biggest problem with Firefox. Up until Thursday, I was still running 3.6 because I really dislike dealing with add-on issues during upgrades. When a new version of Firefox comes out, I tend to backup my install, upgrade to see how badly it breaks, then revert back out to the older version.
When I finally upgraded to v5, I spent a solid hour trying to get the thing back into a workable state.
The biggest mistake I ever made with Firefox was installing Tab Mix Plus, because now I have easily manageable rows of tabs, which led me to using tabs as ephemeral bookmarks - things I want to read but not now. I currently have 175 tabs open (and no, I don't complain about memory usage - it's not that bad and I know what usage there is is my own fault).
To keep things in check, I use an extension called BarTab, which keeps tabs unloaded on restart until I switch to that tab. Upon upgrading to FF5, that extension broke horribly, leading all of my tabs to fire at once. Turning off compatibility checking didn't fix it, and neither did installing a beta version upgrade to the extension. In the end, I had to go searching the extension library until I found something called BarTab Lite, which worked.
Also, my theme was incompatible with Firefox >=4, but I resigned myself to just deal with it, since I was tired of being made fun of for not upgrading a not-quite-five-months out-of-date browser (the community seems to be becoming one of the worst parts of Firefox). Eventually, I found a new theme, which was a non-linked upgrade to my old one. It would be nice if that was a little more obvious.
That was a long winded way of saying I'd like to see more explicit links between extensions. Rather than saying "there are no upgrades for this broken extension", I'd prefer that there be a way to identify "spiritual successors" so that Firefox can tell you "it's got a different name, but this is where extension Foo lives now."
It would have saved me a lot of time and trouble, because as it stands right now it seems a lot of broken extensions don't have upgrades when really they do - they're just hidden and you need to spend some time looking for them.
As far as you can "trust" the updates that come, version numbers are not very useful. I generally see minor versions as bug fixes (number of bugs reduced hopefully) and major versions as major feature changes (number of bugs most likely increased).
Now I just cannot tell anymore whether to upgrade or not. Believe it or not, the current browser* is running just fine for me. I am OK with a speedier browser etc, but not at the cost of more trouble.
There are three versions of Firefox:
Release (the version that you should be using)
Beta (If you want to do some testing, or don't care about minor instability)
Aurora (If you are feeling particularly risky and need a new feature NOW).
I agree, the new version numbers are stupid. If they wanted to copy Chrome's rapid-release schedule, they should have just ditched the version numbers altogether (like Chrome) and just continuously and transparently kept their install base up to date.
There's also a real practical problem to fast-growing version numbers. Historically, a major release would have major new features and might break existing extensions. Minor releases were typically safe to install and were designed to be as compatible as possible with the version they were supplanting. With new major versions of Firefox coming out every 6 weeks you're constantly checking to make sure they haven't changed something critical.
Chrome has version numbers. And similarly, firefox doesn't make a big deal about new version releases since 4.0 was out. The ones that do make a big deal out of them are blogs and tech sites, but those will get bored of doing so soon enough.
Chrome hides the version number, because 98% of the time, it doesn't matter. There's no mention of it on there download page (http://www.google.com/chrome/). They make it available only if you need to get specific.
Not sure if I'd call that "advertising" -- it's a small green number on a green background. Before the rapid release schedule you'd have a 72pt version number hitting you in the face when you went to their main page within a week of a major release.
Never the less, I see what you mean about it being still "visible" to the user.
All the comments about Firefox's version number are the same that were made last summer when Chrome started incrementing their version every six weeks. A year later, I think Chrome users would all agree that the choice of number in the UA string has relatively little impact on users, positive or negative. I'm glad it gives HN something new to argue about for a while, though. :)
No where did I say it was "better", I'm just pointing out that Google has effectively made Chrome version-less, while Firefox is still making a big deal about each of their new versions, despite them having fewer changes.
I think you're looking for conflict where there is none. I use both browsers, depending on what I'm using them for.
* And, most annoyingly, the add-on version check and resulting incompatibilities.
That last one actually is kind of a pain, since, as other people have mentioned, not all add-on authors have updated their add-ons to be compatible with 6.0, despite that being a single character change to an XML file for 98% of them. (Fortunately, addons.mozilla.org does this for authors, so it is only the ones hosting the add-ons themselves that are a problem.)
Mozilla is de-emphasizing the version number and eventually will get rid of it altogether. You can currently only see the version number in small font on their homepage.
Actually firefox is just doing what chrome is doing. Chrome has a major release every 6 weeks and changes it's major version number every 6 weeks. It's great when chrome does it, but when firefox changes their versioning schedule it's "stupid"?
It's just obnoxious because we hear about it when Firefox releases a minor update with a new version number. Did you hear a fanfare about Chrome 12 or 13? No.
It will take a while for the press to get used to the new Firefox release cycle, but by next year it will be treated just like Chrome. Mozilla has already stopped using version numbers in release announcements: https://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/06/21/mozilla-delivers-ne...
There's no fanfare. Firefox released a new version as it does every 6 weeks and people are happy because there's a better, faster firefox. The same thing happens with chrome.
version numbers have been completely de-emphasized. go on the mozilla website (the public site, not the ftp) and find me where it says a version number...
Version numbers aren't meaningless if you have a good system, e.g. major/minor/patch. You just can't use them to compare between two different products. I know Moz wants to be a bit more like Chrome with frequent releases but it seems like this could be done a bit more sensibly wrt the version number.
1) The patch number is for things like bug and security fixes, and gets reset every time the major/minor version gets bumped.
2) Every 6 week release you bump the minor version _unless_ some big feature(s) are ready to be rolled in, in which case you bump the major version instead.
The problem is that, like the boy that cried wolf, they have no way to get attention if they actually want it.
Say that version 32 introduces a "do what I mean" feature where the browser simply goes to whatever site you want, no user interaction required. How are they going to publicize that version 32 is more important than 31 or 33 or 27, all of which were tiny incremental upgrades?
All silliness aside, I see your point. But is the browser really still at a point where such earth-shifting changes are likely to occur? The biggest single change of the last few years that I can think of is the addition of tabs to browers, and even that is a feature that's been around for 20 years in other programs. Any change that's much bigger than that almost warrants a whole new product, regardless of your numbering scheme.
Through my line of work I end up seeing a lot of nuanced differences between browser version numbers. It's kind of a myth that browser versions (usually read as releases -- not actual version numbers) don't matter any more. I see things break quite regularly that people don't expect. And while browsers on the whole are getting better, the slow introduction of CSS 3 and HTML 5 features make a huge difference.
