Firefox 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0 to Ship in 2011

Zen00 said:

At least the private browsing was a real feature, not just some update gimmick.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I use Chrome as my default browser and do my actual web browsing with Firefox because I prefer it. I always use the beta/dev versions of Chrome. Not because I want to be ahead of the curve or test anything, I just like to have everything updated and simply because there aren't really any significant changes like there are with Firefox. I usually download the first Firefox beta and then uninstall it and wait until the final version because I know my browsing experience will change if I do. Anyways, these numbers mean nothing to people who don't care about what's happening with their browser as long as they can get to Facebook and Youtube but it'd be a silly move for Mozilla to start labeling their minor releases and bugfixes with traditional major release numbers.

justlloyd said:

Anyways, these numbers mean nothing to people who don't care about what's happening with their browser as long as they can get to Facebook and Youtube

Isn't that what browsers are for? You might go to a different website, say sevenforums.com instead of Facebook, but ... do you really do anything else with your browser apart from visiting websites?

Granted, internet banking is serious and requires all the latest security patches. Supposedly, IE8 and 9 are way more secure that previous versions and on par with Firefox. Good, that's the reason to care about them.

But "new browsing features"? Give me a break. Every browser since Mosaic has an address bar where you type the URL and then there is the main Window with the site content. Pretty much all of them have some sort of bookmarking feature. OK, tabs were a nice additional feature. Firefox cookie handling is great. Passwords may be stored on your computer - good, but not everyone likes it. That's about all I can count as really important features, everything else is basically eye candy.

So for me version numbers are irrelevant. Tell me what's new in FF 6.0 and then we'll talk. For now, I do run 4.0b pre 12 x64 on my laptop and aside from daily updates it runs great. Anything really different from Namoroka 3.6 x64 that I run on my desktop - not that I can see (I mean really different, not some minor option tweak, address bar shape, or search from address bar nonsense).

Yeah, I guess I misspoke in saying that people just want to get to their websites. Of course, that's the ultimate goal but the overall experience has to count for something, which is the reason people prefer certain browsers. I guess that's beside the point though. I was just saying, I preferred their current model of saving the X.0 version numbers for major releases, instead of adapting Google's.

Those guys at mozilla speak too much and they don't release anything.

I'll start caring about browser numbers when they start charging me for browsers.

I think FF 4 and 5 are possible this year after that it is a different story..