byuu wrote:There is no Firefox 2.0. There is a "Firefox 2", which, while the same thing to the computer scientist in me, is not at all the same from a marketing perspective.
Window dressing. This is the kind of argument a lawyer would make. Everyone in the world is going to consider it v2.0.
You'd be amazed how most of the people in the world are confused by version numbers and don't understand the entire concept. They just want to know if it's different or not. Things like ".0" at the end of the number don't mean anything to them. Firefox 2 looks different than Firefox. Firefox 1.5 wasn't "different" than Firefox 1.0, which is why we got constant surprised reactions from people when we told them they should upgrade.
It doesn't seem that hard to understand to me, but then there are a lot of things that don't seem hard to me that almost everyone else in the world gets wrong.
Exactly my point. Firefox is artificially bumping the version numbers more and more with less and less actual changes, so that more people will download / upgrade their software.
You are aware that the number of changes in each of these upcoming releases is quite large, right?
Even I've never thought of version numbers as having to correlate with the raw quantity of changes. It's the impact of the changes that matters. Major version numbers (to me, if everyone did what I would want) should mean a major functional shift/rewrite with large impact. Minor numbers reflect smaller patches, fixes, and progress on the way to whatever next major stepping stone or stable point you believe you're at.
In that sense, projects like MAME and the Linux kernel increment major version numbers far too rarely IMO, while things like iTunes bump it too often. Given the types of changes in the Firefox releases, they're closer to my ideal than any of the projects listed above, though still probably too aggressive in bumping the branding number. (And yes, when you drop the .0, it's a branding thing, not a versioning thing.)
When "Firefox 27" comes out, it's going to look stupid. Far less people will be willing to upgrade "Firefox 26" to "Firefox 27" than would upgrade "Firefox 2" to "Firefox 3".
Well, for one, maybe that will be relevant if we're still around in 35 years or so. But for another, adoption rates on things that bump numbers rapidly like Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc. say that you're wrong
Really, we don't have any reason to believe that the majority of folks consider the numbers in terms of ratios: they don't seem to believe "2" is twice as good as "1", just that it's better. And "27" is not "just barely better than 26", it's "better".
So, you either keep arbitrarily increasing version numbers by greater and greater amounts (looking increasingly stupid) or you keep modest version numbers, like the majority of other software out there does.
As I've tried to imply before, you only look stupid to the 0.05% of the population that are geeky like us and actually care about this sort of thing. And yes, my argument against going to 2 was that if only 0.05% care, and THEY think it's dumb, then why not do something that makes them happy, if it doesn't matter to the rest of people? But the truth is that it does matter in a marketing sense, and we do really want people to get "Firefox 2", so we're kind of stuck with it. So if you'd like to complain that the public consists of idiots, I'm right there with you, but sadly we have to find a way to work with those "idiots" as they're almost the entirety of our customer base.
