So Firefox 5 is here. That’s great, I guess, but what’s new? Even on Mozilla’s own What’s new page for Firefox 5 there isn’t much. When I visit is during the writing of this post all I can see is that it’s apparently easy to customize Firefox with add-ons and plugins, but that’s hardly news.

The release notes lists a few minor features and the biggest one seems to be support for CSS Animations.That’s great, I guess, but why does that warrant a bump from version 4 to version 5.

Firefox used to be very slow when it came to releases. (It’s still very slow when it comes to actual usage.) This new fast release pace is probably to compete with Google Chrome, which has a very aggressive release cycle and fast iteration. I like fast progress, but I don’t like the devaluation of version numbers. If a small amount of features warrants a full version number jump then the users will quickly tire of updating.

The big difference in my opinion between Firefox and Chrome releases is that all tough they both nowadays want to bump version often, it irritates me a lot more when Firefox does it. The reason for this is that Chrome updates is absolutely silent. Nothing informs me that an update is available, it just installs. Once it installs nothing informs me that there has been an update, it just works slightly better than before. This is far less obtrusive and don’t have the same devaluating effect.

So great news Firefox, I guess, but a bump to 4.1 instead of 5 would have felt a lot more motivated. (The worst is that I recall reading/hearing something about Microsoft adopting the same aggressive versioning.)