Google Schedules Chrome 6, 7, and 8 For This Year 138
An anonymous reader writes "Google said that it will be releasing a new stable version of Chrome every six weeks, which is about twice as fast as the release pace today. The goal is to make new features available when they are done and to make Chrome releases more predictable. Has anyone complained that there were too few new Chrome releases? Mozilla has been releasing a major new browser update twice a year and Microsoft is on an 18-24 month pace. Firefox's 4.0 Beta 2 is scheduled for release soon, and it appears that Mozilla is somewhat paranoid about the Black Hat Conference. 3.6.6 was planned to be the original 'Black Hat release'; now we are at version 3.6.7 and Mozilla has already a build candidate of 3.6.8 that will be released depending on news coming out of Black Hat."
Why? (Score:3, Informative)
It gets upgraded automatically anyway, no reason to encourage people there... (yes, I do hope, perhaps in vain, that it doesn't affect the decisions on the level of "I can't use this browser, it has too low number")
Who cares (Score:0, Informative)
Not me.. I use Opera and .. telnet/curl
Re:Speculation (Score:5, Informative)
You are exactly right. And it's quite noble of Google they are actually planning to release version 6 to 8 at all. They could take an example of Sierra or Microsoft.
The Larry team at Sierra On-Line felt they were falling behind to King's Quest in the late eightees. King's Quest was already at number 4 in 1988, while a year later Larry only released part 3. To get ahead, the folks at the Larry team decided to skip part 4 altogether and go straight on to Larry 5.
Microsoft played an even worse trick with Word for Windows when they released version 6 in '93 after their previous version 2 from '91. Afterall, WordPerfect was also at version 6, so now Word was up to speed as well.
Re:Speculation (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget bind, went from 4.9 to 9 in the mid-late 1990s.
Re:Release Early & often..... (Score:3, Informative)
Google hasn't said they plan to increase the number of UI changes Chrome experience per unit time. They just said they plan on releasing on a frequent and regular schedule, and releasing whatever features are ready for a stable release at each release.
Re:Speculation (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft played an even worse trick with Word for Windows when they released version 6 in '93 after their previous version 2 from '91. Afterall, WordPerfect was also at version 6, so now Word was up to speed as well.
Sort of. Microsoft Word for Mac was at version 5.1 at this point, and to synchronize version numbers between the platforms, they decided to call the next version on both Windows and Mac version 6. (This was also the first time the Windows and Mac versions shared siginficant amount of code, much to the detriment of the Mac version. In fact, MS offered free "downgrades" to 5.1 due to all the complaints. Anyway, this code-sharing is probably also responsible for their desire for version-number synchronization.)
Of course, I'm sure looking equal or better next to WordPerfect didn't hurt, either. :)
Re:Speculation (Score:3, Informative)