Software versioning - the world has gone mad

[AtW]

It started with Windows 95 that instead of nice version used year of release, no doubt to make buyers feel they have outdated product few years later.

Now the trend is even worse: Firefox v4 was released earlier this year, quickly followed by 5 and 6, and now already beta 7 available just weeks from last release, FFS - Chrome is on version 13 already.

[craig1]

A full release gets press coverage from the techie sites and mags, a dot release won't get anything other than a passing glance from the same journos while it downloads via an automatic update.

As with many other aspects of software, the marketing and PR people dominate.

[SimonMac]

I still love Oracle 1, was was never released instead going straight to 2.0 so people though it was stable

[VectraMan]

A full release gets press coverage from the techie sites and mags, a dot release won't get anything other than a passing glance from the same journos while it downloads via an automatic update.

As with many other aspects of software, the marketing and PR people dominate.

Firefox is free, so who cares? And if they do a major release now, who's going to notice?

C++ seems to have gone from 98, to 0x to 11. So that's okay then.

[minestrone]

I'm still on FF2 and IE6 in here.

[AtW]

C++ seems to have gone from 98, to 0x to 11. So that's okay then.

They use years to mark release and had like 3 released in nearly 15 years, that's slow if anything.

[wim121]

Now the trend is even worse: Firefox v4 was released earlier this year, quickly followed by 5 and 6, and now already beta 7 available just weeks from last release, FFS - Chrome is on version 13 already.

Yea, firefox went away from the update labels like FF3 where it got up to something like FF3.16.13. Now they are following the IE/chrome format of FF4, FF5, FF6, etc.

FF5 and FF6 are horrible, buggy and slow. On FF4 here.

I'm still on FF2 and IE6 in here.

There is a website set up by MS called IE6countdown.

I emailed them quite a while back spanning a few pages, telling them they were completely incompetant, unaware of their markets/customers and how I would prefer having a drunk chimp coding for me, rather than any of their programmers.


They just dont seem to get, that so many businesses use IE6 still. One of my old contracts, they couldnt use IE7 or above because a lot of the bespoke software relied on IE6 and how it rendered pages.

They also seem to think that XP and old generations of OS's will disappear when they eventually discontinue it, but it wont. So many companies still use w23k server and xp on desktops. Some would love new pc's with win7, but most of the business software wouldnt work, so it would be pointless.