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."

Comments

Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Speculation

[dingen]

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

[treeves]

So why not go straight to 11? Then it beats OS X too, which has been stuck at Roman Numeral ten for-freaking-ever.

Re:Speculation

[Inner_Child]

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.

Except this isn't right. The reason there was no Leisure Suit Larry 4 was, in the words of the creator:

So why did Leisure Suit Larry 5 follow Leisure Suit Larry 3?

Why wasn't Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work named Larry 4?

There are several reasons:

I always assumed the series would be a trilogy. It just seemed right. I was pleased that people enjoyed Larry 2 enough to convince Sierra that a third installment would be well received. Therefore, I made the ending of Larry 3 air tight: Larry and Patti were together at last; Larry was telling his life story through a computer game; it appeared they would live happily ever after, etc.

While Larry 3 was in "crunch mode," I was working 'round the clock to get it out in time for the 1990 holiday shopping season. I grew tired. And tired of Larry. When Sierra employees asked me about the next Larry, my disgusted response was, "There's not going to be a Larry 4! I'm stopping with three."

When we finally gave up trying to develop a multi-player on-line adventure, I came up with some fun ideas for the fourth game, but I was stuck for a beginning. I couldn't figure out how to start the story because I had left Larry and Patti living happily ever after, remember? How to get them out of Coarsegold?

When my design for the fourth game was well along, one day, in the hallway of Sierra, I ran into an employee I hadn't seen for quite some time. Her first question was, "So what are you working on these days, Al? Larry 4?" And I, in true smart-ass fashion, replied, "No, Larry 5! Of course I'm working on Larry 4!"

A light bulb went off!

Why not? Who says sequels must always be "in order?"

I started bouncing the idea off people. Inevitably, their response was, "Larry 5? What happened to Larry 4?!"

That was exactly what I wanted. Suddenly I was completely freed from the restraints of the Larry 3 ending. I could have the new game begin anywhere. The idea was wacky, silly, dumb in a perfect "Larry-esque" way. And, it solved the "mind share" problem--how to grab people's attention and make them think about the next Larry game and had they missed something?

And that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the whole truth about what happened to Larry 4!

Either that or my dog ate the floppies!

huh.

[igadget78]

So are these all beta's?

Idiots

[neoform]

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!"

Re:Idiots

[mrsquid0]

On the other hand, Apollo 13 blew the pants off the previous 12 Apollo movies.

Not nearly enough updates!

[jtownatpunk.net]

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.

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?