this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
243 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
71884 readers
4863 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I understand that, so then why change it?
This does not appear to be true.
That blog post has an aura of marketing speak around it.
Version numbering has no implication on development and doesn't even need to align internally and publicly, so somewhere a conscious decision was made to do it this way for "reasons". I conjecture those reasons are at least partially due to marketing. Is this not fair?
Read again. I quoted something along the lines of "just as much a development decision as a marketing one" and I said, it wasn't a development decision, so what's left?
Why don't you take a look at the version history instead of some marketing blog post? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/
Version 2 had 20 releases within 730 days, averaging one release every 36.5 days.
Version 3 had 19 releases within 622 days, averaging 32.7 days per release.
But these releases were unscheduled, so they were released when they were done. Now they are on a fixed 90-day schedule, no matter if anything worthwhile was complete or not, plus hotfix releases whenever they are necessary.
That's not faster, but instead scheduled, and also they are incrementing the major version even if no major change was included. That's what the blog post was alluding to.
In the before times, a major version number increase indicated major changes. Now it doesn't anymore, which means sysadmins still need to consider each release a major release, even if it doesn't contain major changes because it might contain them and the version name doesn't say anything about whether it does or not.
It's nothing but a marketing change, moving from "version numbering means something" to "big number go up".
Well, normally, when people see a larger version of a software, they think it's more secure, modern, better, and other things.
For example, not all Chromium projects follow version nomenclatures. Vivaldi, Opera, and Brave all use their own version nomenclatures.