Google Schedules Chrome 6, 7, and 8 For This Year

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."

Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because "Internet Explorer 9" sounds better than "Chrome 5" to some people just because of the version number.

sleazy PR ploy

[fermion]

Just like MS, Google is versioning browser to catch up, not because they do anything new. Google can't even get a product out of beta in less than two years, so why should it be expecting a major upgrade every quarter? Only one reason. To create the impression that the browser is better than Safari 5 (though it uses the same rendering engine) and to reduce the market impression that it is worse than IE 8.

As it is, Chrome 2.0 should have been the 1.0 RTM, with everything before being a 0.x public release candidate(probably 0.5 onward). 3.0 simply added initial support for HTML 5 and improved code, a point release. 4.0 seems pretty real, so that might be have been a 2.0 in traditional terms. Probably by the upcoming version is a credible for real 3.0.

Version numbering really does not matter, but to assert that releasing a version every six weeks is necessary to release features more often is silly. What Google is in fact saying is that Chrome is a very immature browser with a very immature feature set, and they are wiling to sacrifice everything else that once made Chrome a legitimate browser in an effort to make it buzzword compliant.

Re:Idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason why the Xbox 360 isn't called the Xbox 2. It's because 360 > 3 (i.e. Playstation 3), and thus, obviously must be better.

Re:sleazy PR ploy

[Dhalka226]

What Google is in fact saying is that Chrome is a very immature browser with a very immature feature set, and they are wiling to sacrifice everything else that once made Chrome a legitimate browser in an effort to make it buzzword compliant.

So Chrome is an immature browser with an immature feature set and yet a legitimate browser. But if they want to increase the maturity of the feature set "to make it buzzword compliant" that will be sacrificing everything? Does this compute to anybody?

Sometimes new features are just bloat, and they end up bad. That doesn't mean that new features are automatically bad, and it surely doesn't mean that their versioning scheme has anything at all to do with its quality.

Chrome is "legitimate" (whatever that means) or not on its own merits, not how often they release or what version number they attach to such releases. And frankly, if it's a "sleazy PR ploy" the only reason for it is that it works. If people truly believe Chrome is worse than Safari 5 or IE 8 just because of the version number why is it "sleazy" to take that excuse away and force people to actually evaluate the browser on its merits?

Publicity without visibility?

[shish]

So far everyone seems to be saying that the version number is a publicity thing; but I've been using chrome for about 6 months and have no idea what my version number is. What sort of publicity stunt hides in the background only visible to people who go out of their way to check the "about" menu?