Mozilla To Remove User-Facing Firefox Version Numbers

MrSeb writes "A great collective gasp issued from tuned-in Firefox fans when Mozilla announced that it was switching to a Chrome-like release schedule for its browser. Now Mozilla wants to take things one step further and remove Firefox version numbers entirely — from the user-facing parts of the browser, anyway." You can see the Bugzilla entry for this change, and keep up on Mozilla's reasoning and discussion through a thread on the mozilla.dev.usability newsgroup. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler explained, "We're moving to a more Web-like convention where it's simply not important what version you're using as long as it's the latest version. ... The most important thing is confidence that they're on the latest release. That's what the About dialog will give them."

Comments

Re:This isn't a Mozilla problem...

[MonsterTrimble]

The vast majority of their current user base don't care enough to complain - they just switched to Chrome or IE.

What should worry Mozilla is that a number of linux distributions are switching. Even Ubuntu itself had the switch from Firefox to Chromium on the plate for 11.10. I would place a bet on it actually happening for the 12.04 LTS. Ubuntu, like it or not, wields a lot of clout within the open source community and when they decide to make the switch it makes a lot of distributions look long and hard at following suit.