If you like your Firefox releases quick and pointless, this is for you! Mozilla's today posted the final builds of Firefox 6 onto their FTP.

Mac: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/f ... mac/en-US/
Windows: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/f ... n32/en-US/
Linux: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/f ... 686/en-US/

imho they've just gone kind of crazy with what they're trying to pass off as major releases, this is Firefox 4.2 at best.

Wow. I've never been so disappointed at Mozilla before. FF6 already? I remember when FF3 came out almost a year after FF2. They've gone through 2 versions through the last 7 months, and they're almost not different at all.

A few weeks ago Mozilla published final version of FF5 and now FF6? In my opinion it means that FF5 was so buggy. I hope that FF6 will be the newest version for longer time than a few weeks.

I've been using "Nightly"/minefield since version 4, and it's been at 8b1 for a while with still nothing changed. Reminds me of chromium, with a minor update every major release. Not much has changed from chrome 10 to chromium 15 other than the version number. It's funny how from 3.6.x to 4 firefox changed completed but from 4 to 8 it hasn't changed at all. :/

Let me clear up some things on what's going on:

• A few browsers sped up their release speed after Chromes success with a 6 week release schedule and update policy. It keeps all content current (important on the ever evolving web that your customers not have to wait 2 years longer than the competition to get a new web feature).
• Chrome updates so often and it's hardly noticeable in the small increments that it automatically updates silently and as a result the latest version is the second most popular browsing client on the web (after ie8) even though when you tie all versions of browsers together it is well in third. Meanwhile you still have clueless IE6 and Firefox 2.0 clueless users out there who don't like changing what they know.
• For people who say it should be 4.2 or something: if new versions are released every 2 or 3 months when is there ever going to be enough changes in one of them for it to become 5? The point of development isn't to accumulate enough changes to change the build number it's to make improvement and get them to customers asap. And before anyone says well why not just increment by .1 until it reaches the next number I'll ask: how is that any different/cleaner than just incrementing the number?

Yes Indeed, I still remember when I used Firefox 1 that came along with my Planet Prepaid dial-up disk. The speed of Firefox's updates are multiplying dramatically. From what I know firefox 1, 2 and 3 had dramatic UI changes, after version 4 it looks almost the same, whats going on. Unless there making major changes under the hood, there shouldn't be any reason for them not to spice up to bonet a little after each version.

Well it probably wouldn't be good to have 45 different chromes and people who use different versions, I use chromium for the reason that it doesn't auto-update. I like to update on my own, choose when to and not have the background lag that (really is there) maybe isn't noticeable for some but is very annoying, and having to drop everything and install updates. Maybe it's useful for most people but I just find it annoying. And if they did get to version 50 in the next few years then that would create a problem on it's own,
"What version of chrome are you using?"
"43, you?"
"Oh wow I'm only using 38!"
Or
"This website only supports chrome 22-40, and firefox 17-30. Not chrome 31 or firefox 24-27."
Websites would always have to test and modify contents to give support to over 50 versions of browsers, it's hard enough to support ie6, ie7, ie8, ie9, ie10, firefox 3.6.x, firefox4-8, chrome 3-15,opera 11+ and safari 5 all now but imagine if there were that many versions of each web browser and what it would do to web developers...Unless they just build upon each browser and not add anything new.

I hope people now realize that the "google strategy" isn't that good at all. I mean yeah, sure they bring a new "major" release every couple of weeks, but they improve little or nothing... It would be cool if they actually include a major new feature or two instead of just bugfixes... Unfortunately, more companies are heading that way (including MS) but I hope not all would fail like Mozilla...

I think google chrome, since being a fairly new web browser from 2008~, should still be at version 5 or 6. It doesn't change often enough to earn these major status updates. Look at internet explorer, version 6 to 7-It got tabs, greater web security, performance enhancements, but chrome from 6 to 7? Lost the feature Phantom Tabs. (I really liked that, phantom tabs were something that is often implemented in mobile devices, where if you middle clicked or closed a pinned tab, it would go transparent and clear from memory, making a temporary pinned bookmark, where if you clicked on it it would load the page again) and that was about it for chrome. Internet explorer went up a version and gained tabs, one of the most important things in a web browser today, and chrome went up a version only to lose features. I think for once we should take ideas from microsoft-they had the idea, new build number, new features, major version number, major changes.

Chrome makes many releases which change the main build number because it always has done so. But Mozilla haven't. they're not introducing anything of any interest any more. This should be FF4.2.

talking about epic failure

Well by the time Windows 8 is out, we'll be on Chrome 25 and Firefox 17.

Hey how come when i clicked on the index.html on there, it says they are not finished with it yet?

they offer 5.0.1 on official site

Well it has been all over the news that they want to reach Firefox 7 until 2012, it looks like to me they don't care about the users anymore but shares and money, even though they're going to lose it this way.

I'm seeing we reaching Windows 8 with IE 10 and Chrome 60 and Firefox 40.2

We don't need these high version numbers. It's "do not want". They are adding so little features that doesn't even count as a whole version. What's wrong with subversions? There's still the memory management bug present in version 6 and it's fixed in version 7 Aurora. They are just copycats because they can't keep up with Chrome and Opera.
They should better stop these silly jokes and start fixing some serious bugs instead. I used to love Firefox in the past and now I'm using Chrome, because of the annoying crashes and high memory usage.
Chrome seems fine for now, but if they change their mind and they innovate then I will give him another chance.

You bring on some valid points,


Remember Chromium is not at all Chrome, they share the same code base but what they are and represent is much different.

Well the logic of the new system is that when you have the updates every 2 or 3 months you don't need to push a full update and send out an installer. The Chrome team for instance sends out a 1MB difference file at low priority in the background and it's done installing in less than 15 seconds after closing the browser on even the slowest computers. I doubt however that Firefox is at that stage.

I don't to see haw that is any different than "What Firefox are you using, 3.0 or 3.5? Ah, cool, i'm on Opera 11.50" all have 2 (or more) digits in the version. I suppose to a long time browser user it may seem out of proportion though.

This is one of the parts where the cons may outweigh the pros for this system, not because it is harder to code (it's actually easier to code Chrome 22 and up than throw in minor version numbers to grab) but because the developer has to know when the browsers actually added the feature. In a perfect world we would just check if the browser supports the feature but I know most sites don't do that.

It sucks just as much as versions 4 and 5 for Windows. It's better than Safari or Chrome though on my mac.

Because even though this is the final build, it isn't "officially" released on Mozilla.org yet - they keep that up there until they've actually posted it.

It sounds much better than when I used chrome beta in 2008-2009, on my old laptop it was crashing, making extra useless startup processes, creating lag, using a lot of my already slow internet and eating cpu. It's good to see they finally improved that, but it scared me off of any auto update, I now manually update my computers, programs, and all apps on my ipod just to avoid auto-update nightmares like that.

And to a long time browser user it does seem weird for these version numbers, I always junp when I see a new chrome version then find out nothing's new...They donhave small version numbers too though, like right now is 15.0.853.0, they update more often. Forgot to mention that.

There internet's fascination with version numbers always appeals to my humorous side.

I don't see the significance of changing the version numbers and adding no major features. Each time a little security flaw is fixed they now want to release a new version.

You know, I'm no IE fan, but at least Microsoft is putting new and meaningful stuff in it. IE 9 was a big change over 8. 8 fixed alot of the issues 7 had. 7 was a big change over 6. 6 modernized 5 and fixed some issues. 5 was an improvement over 4. 4 changed 3's interface. 3 changed the interface of 2. 2 improved over 1. And who knows what 10 will bring us. And considering that were only now at the tenth release in 16 years, Microsoft is being pretty wise with this stuff.

P.S. I know they shouldn't of let IE 6 stagnate as long as it did, but they released 7 and it helped fix alot of the problems and holes 6 had.

6 was worse than 5.5
and 8 is often considered worse than 7 was

On the other hand, even MS is speeding up the dev process, but for now not too much like Google, Mozilla, etc. but in case they go crazy like those companies then their share will definetly fall a lot, and that's not what they want...