14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is considering getting rid of version numbers for Firefox, at least as far as what users see is concerned. This is an outcome of the fast development cycle Mozilla has adopted, which sees a new Firefox come out every six weeks.
But not everyone, most people actually, agrees with the trend. One thing in particular has stirred up a lot more controversy that a trivial change normally would.
Mozilla wants to remove the version number from the Firefox about box. There will be ways of finding out which Firefox version you're running, but the one that most people use will be gone.
The apparent reason for this is to force users to stop thinking about version numbers and just accept that they run Firefox, and that's that.
Firefox has always been community driven, while Mozilla does much of the core development and takes many of the decisions, the community has always played a big part.
This is why the way the move was communicated actually caused more controversy that the change itself.
Basically, it was a given that this will happen and no community feedback was asked or even welcomed. While critics to the move kept on adding their view in the comment thread of the original bug post, the discussion was anything but healthy.
We've already highlighted some of the major concerns with the proposed feature last week.
But the discussion turned worse as contributors started to believe that their opinion on the matter was not even being considered.
In fact, some of the later comments didn't focus as much on the version number than on the fact that Mozilla seemed completely unwilling to listen to them, this while providing no explanation for why the version number had to go other than the 'we know what's best for you' approach.
Read Write Web has a compilation of some of the notable comments, but the general feeling is obvious, contributors don't like the way they're being treated.
While quickly iterating version numbers lose their value, Google Chrome is at version 15 for example, removing them altogether doesn't seem like much of a solution.
Case in point is Mozilla's Firefox 7 Beta announcement. While everyone knew that Firefox 7 was graduating to the beta channel, the actual announcement is titled "New Firefox Beta with Enhanced Performance" and there is no mention of the version number in the post.
There are several problems with this. On the one hand, months or years down the line, someone will find the post and will have no idea to what Firefox version it was for. The fact that Mozilla included the version number in the URL to the announcement, presumably to differentiate between different beta announcements, highlights the issue quite clearly.
An even bigger problem, users won't know whether a beta update is a regular, bug fixing one, Firefox gets several of those during the time it spends in the Beta channel, or it's a 'big' beta update, one that comes with new features and, potentially, new bugs.