Chrome does have a lot to answer for with it's numbering - but lets not forget that IE is now at 9, Opera is at 11 - by comparison '4'
sounds old to the uninitiated
My reaction would be to wonder "When did I buy a Mac?" ...
Wrap it up in a bow and call it Windows Snow Leopard?
That's exactly what I was thinking.
Seriously though, I think even those who aren't tech-savvy know that version numbers only pertain to the one product that has them, and they're not a way to compare advancement between different products.
Otherwise, people would think iOS 4 is newer than Android 3.0, Mac OS X is newer than Windows 7, and Windows 98 is newer than all of them.
Some research:
Internet Explorer 1 came out in 1995, so it took them close to 16 years to reach Internet Explorer 9. And every release in recent history brought significant changes over the last (be they good or bad).
Opera 2.0 (the first public version) came out in 1996, so it took them about 14 years to reach Opera 11. A little faster than IE, but I'm pretty sure that every major Opera release has actually
been a major release.
Firefox 1.0 came out in 2004, and it's taken them 7 years to reach Firefox 4. Each big release has brought major changes and improvements, to the point where none of the four versions even look like the same browser.
Safari 1.0 was released in 2003, and it took them 7 years to reach Safari 5.
Again, each time they released was a major update in every sense of the word.
Chrome 1.0 was released at the end of 2008, so it took them two years to reach Chrome 9.0, with 10.0 in development.
Huh?! A glance at Wikipedia reveals the problem: the current stable version is 9.0, and the current dev version is 10.0.
No minor versions at all. The only minor version Chrome has had since 1.0, was 4.1. Every other release has been a x.0, and according to Wikipedia's summary changelog, they don't have much to show for it. I updated my (for-testing-purposes) installation of Chrome from 6.0 to 9.0 and saw nothing that made me register I had just leaped ahead three "major" releases.
The current standardized version system of x.0, x.1, x.2, etc ... makes so much more sense than this new "everything we do is major" crap. At this rate, in 2012-2013, we will be using Google Chrome 20! And it will probably be pretty much just what it is now. By the end of the decade, we will be on Google Chrome 68! And it will probably have undergone only about 6-7 true "major" upgrades since Chrome 1.
The only thing more pathetic, is the fact that Mozilla has bought into this...
