Computer Hope
Software => Internet browsers => Topic started by: 2x3i5x on January 06, 2011, 01:52:55 PM
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Is this just a marketing gimmick for Google Chrome? Google Chrome is already rolling out 10.0.628.0 Beta.
I'm using this browser, well, the ChromePlus (http://www.chromeplus.org) version of it, and I like it.
But it's already at version 10 given its short lifetime compared to the other big name browsers out there :P
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Well, I have the latest version of Opera and it's version 11. :P
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Version numbering is pretty meaningless since everybody and their pet dog seems to have a different definition of what the different parts of a version number mean. Additionally there is a tendency for many companies to just skip 5 or 6 versions and hope nobody will notice.
Microsoft Word for Windows, for example, somehow made their 3rd installment version 6. "For consistency" Visual J++ had version 1.0, 1.1, and then broke new ground with version 6.0, despite it being what any sane person would call 2.0.
This sort of version indifference is exactly what causes products to quickly soar past double digit numbering, because the company can make the major version number increment whenever they *censored* well please. "Oh, we added a button... better increment the major version".
usually you change a version number when you essentially rewrite the program from scratch or otherwise perform Major version changes. This is why it gets the name Major Version Number. You should have the make Major Version changes to warrant a change. below that you have Minor Versions, which are reset to zero whenever you increment the major version number, and only incremented when you make somewhat smaller changes- like say, add a new dialog, or a new feature. Then you have revision, which pretty much reveals how many changes you've made, and then build number which is the number of builds it took to get it right, starting from the first build of a Major Version.
Some companies, like Google and whomever makes Opera (although Opera has been around long enough to actually have something that legitimately is in version 11) have decided, "you know what, to *censored* with versioning standards, let's have a trained monkey pull flash cards out of it's arse and then use those numbers as the new version. And then in traditional Google style they let it fester in beta for about 5 times longer then anybody else would sanely do, meanwhile actually changing ALL THE VERSIONING NUMBER COMPONENTS. Here's a protip, if you change the version number during a beta, it's no longer a flipping beta. it's a freaking Drama sequence. a Beta version is a mostly complete piece of software t hat is ready for some real-world testing. If you go and make changes major enough to change the major version number you're not really testing the same product, are you unless of course you follow the same "count the number of times we see the word "Shiny" in the changelog" and use that as a major version number that some software companies seem to follow, in which case congratulations you've just created a huge clusterfook.
Basically, my point is, Version numbers are not something you can compare between programs. Software Product A Version 8 is no more or less advanced then Software Product B Version 12, for all we know the latter is run by and developed by a bunch of mentally deficient monkeys with aspergers syndrome and the latter is created by a bunch of buddhist monks, it doesn't matter through because the version number is just a comparison value you use to see "oh, hey, I wonder if I have the latest version" Because apparently there are people who say this about every bloody program. It’s understandable for browsers, and for a number of browser-based/web-based technologies, as well as things like the .NET framework, and of course the core of windows itself. But, seriously, the main reason you update a program is to fix bugs and add features, and hope that the bugs and security concerns that a new version adds (And they always do, unless the change is extremely minor) don’t outweigh the benefit of having the known vulnerabilities and the existing bugs eliminated. You don't just download or check for an update because "hey, there might be security fixed" because for one thing they never say what those "security fixes" are, for all we know it could mean that they inserted a backdoor or something. Second, it's not something you are going to personally benefit from, regardless of the number of articles you've read online about it, exploits and vulnerabilities are actually one of the lowest forms of getting control of a remote system, and also the easiest to squelch. What you really need to watch for are the ones who take advantage of a flawed design- mostly in the implementations of protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and so forth. No New version of any security system is going to help you catch and detect those, except for those that install a giant uncleanable filter to your ports under the guise of a firewall and then everytime a little speck of dust get's stuck to the filter it asks "do you want to let this through? What about this? Are you sure you want to do that? and then they just eat the speck anyway making the question moot.
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I completely agree, BC. To compare version numbers between different software makers is meaningless. As you said, Opera has been around a long time and they do use incremental number between whole digits. I believe my previous version of Opera was 10.63. Opera does not break their numbering into 3 parts, like Firefox (example: 3.6.13), so that also affects the pattern of change in numbering as subsequent versions are released.
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At least Both of them have actually gone through all the previous numbers, as well. Opera's current ver is 11. whatever, but at least they didn't entirely skip major versions for seemingly no reason. One good example of that is Microsoft, and it started about the time they decided that Years were somehow a better measure then a actual version number, or something. Office used to be sold as "Office Version Blah dot blah", 4.2 was the last numbered version of "Office", and it had (iirc) Excel 5, Word 6, PowerPoint 4, And Access 2.0 in various minor versions and they had all "gone through", except for MS word which somehow managed to skip along from 2.0 all the way to 6.0 for no reason at all (well, that's not true, apparently they didn't want to "confuse anybody", which seems a bit backwards.). Anyway, with Office 95 they decided to basically make them all have the same version so POOF they all were version 8 (Office 7 might have made them all ver 7 but I haven't used that so I don't know). MS has done this time and time again and they claim it is "for consistency" as if releasing something like Visual Studio or Office with different versions for the constituent products will give our little tiny brains a hemmorage or something. Thankfully most of their products are either labelled and the actual version essentially ignored by all (like Version 4.0 (95) 4.1.1998 (98), 4.1.2222(98SE) 4.9 (ME) 5.0(2000) 5.1(XP) 6.0 (Vista) and the classic Windows 7, which is version 6.1) But I think rather then clarify anything they've only served to make things more confusing.
Of course this topic is more about version numbers themselves, and not just MS or how it versions things, but it was slightly related. Basically, comparing Version numbers between two products is no different from comparing the features of a word processor to video recording software.