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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."
Maybe because "Internet Explorer 9" sounds better than "Chrome 5" to some people just because of the version number.
So are these all beta's?
Anyone that says, "Oh, Internet Explorer 9 is better than Chrome 5" is an idiot.
That's like saying, "Terminator 4 is clearly better than The Godfather, look it's 3 versions newer!"
MABASPLOOM!
Certainly, there have been complaints that features that are stable in the beta channel not being in stable; having more frequent feature releases to stable addresses that.
I won't be happy until my browser updates every time I launch it and at least once an hour while I'm browsing. And the updates should force an automatic restart.
is not always good. If you are talking about changes like Safari 4 to 5 where nothing changed much in terms of interface and user interaction, it's just a version number. But if you start monkeying around with the UI and changing things that quickly. You make people mad.
As an example I'll use Blender 3D. I used to work as the IT guy in a post production shop that mostly used Lightwave about a decade ago. I got to learn some of the basics, but 3D was a hobby along with video editing. I did some work on the side with FCP, but all the 3D work I did was pure fun & hobby. I was no where near talented enough to do it pro and the $2000 price tag of Lightwave made it a bit pricey (especially given the rendering times). Blender became usable for my goals in the 2.3x series and best of all I could get relatively cheap distributed rendering. I forget the exact details, but it was something like $50 per month unlimited frames of Blender. And I could do it month to month. So basically I'd create my scenes. That usually would take 3 - 5 months to get a few minutes of video. Once I had enough scenes to render about 5 minutes worth of animation, I'd buy a month subscription to the service and render away with multiple passes, etc..
Well, then things started to change with the 2.4x version where it seemed like just as I got used to the new interface, boom, everything suddenly changed and I'd spent the next month trying to figure out where all the old buttons went and what the new ones did. Then the physics engine changed and all the previous scenes I had with particles effects would have to be redone and this continued it seemed like every 6 months. As someone who got to use the program a few hours a week, it seemed like every 6 months I was trying to relearn a program I had been using since 2000.
Meanwhile, in the last couple years if I had used Lightwave, I would have had to upgrade once between Lightwave 8 and 9. And frankly, the interface hasn't changed that much since I started using the application in 1999 with version 5.6. A few things have moved, a bunch of features have been added, but basically I can load up the demo of 9 and within a weekend have my first scene ready to render. The overall style of the interface hasn't changed that much.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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?
I'm imagining a shutdown dialog that runs " I know that you are planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. "