Hacker News Reader

Comment by terrellm | Hacker News Reader

Geesh they are already on version 7 and Chrome? Maybe someone at Google forgot to include the "1." in front of the version.

It's interesting that Internet Explorer, which came out in 1995, is on version 9 while Chrome which came out just two years ago is already on version 7.

Edits below to address the downvotes:

Maybe I didn't communicate my point clearly. I certainly didn't intend to knock Chrome - I use it along with Safari as my primary browsers.

My point was more to say "come on guys, 7 versions in 2 years while everyone else (FF, IE, Safari, Opera) has had one or two?".

Maybe I'm biased because I worked at a software company years ago who wanted to communicate their product was as mature as the competition's and skipped straight from version 1.0 to version 4.0. An no, I'm not implying Chrome is less mature than others.

View on HN

This is just how Chromium does versioning.

Chromium version #'s are four parts: major.minor.build.patch. Of these four parts, major.minor are "marketing" controlled. The other two parts, build.patch are engineering controlled and related to the Chromium branching strategy.

Chromium develops everything on trunk. Typically, once a day, they increment the build #. The build #'s are part of their branching process. Once a branch is cut, its build # is fixed. Instead, only the patch # is incremented on that branch, again about once a day.

So for example, the current stable release is milestone 5. This was built from the 375 branch. So the full version # is 5.0.375.127, which indicates that about 127 days have passed since the 375 branch was cut as you can see here:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=...

Chromium hasn't made much use of the minor part of the version #, the notable exception being 4.1.

Also, historically, Chromium has aimed to release a new major version every 6 months. But they announced recently that they plan to move to an even shorter release schedule:

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/07/release-early-release-often...

So if you think it's got high versions now, just wait. I notice that even though milestone 6 is only in the beta channel, the dev channel already has milestone 7 loaded in it:

http://omahaproxy.appspot.com/

tl;dr: Chrome versions move fast because they have a major milestone release every 6 months and soon the versions will move even faster.

> http://omahaproxy.appspot.com/

cf,dev,7.0.503.0,6.0.495.0

what does cf mean?

Probably Chrome Frame, which lets you run Chrome in IE.

This isn't unheard of - emacs is at version 22, but it is really only because they grew tired of adding 1. in front.

Software versioning never made much sense in the first place.

Well in the case of commercial software it made a lot of money by changing the UI a bit, adding a few bullet points to the comparison matrix and incrementing the version by one.

Smart marketing, it's perceived stability.

"Oh, you're running Firefox''3.5''? my Chrome is on version 7"*

(*note, I have overheard pretty much this exact conversation)

Why do you imagine that versioning should be used for anything other than milestones the development team believe are important enough to warrant bumping the major version number?

Also, do you imagine that Chrome 7 is not as advanced and has not seen as much improvement as IE 7? If you look at the advancements made with each Chrome revision, they are as significant as, if not sometimes more than, the differences between major versions of Firefox or IE.

Are you kidding? Try comparing IE3 to IE7, and Chrome 3 to Chrome 7...

Doesn't really matter. The version numbers are for internal use and for tech blogs, the consumer is never exposed to it because of the auto update.

It's an interesting behavior though, not just Chrome, but everyone. Certain numbers have meanings (1.0 being the most famous), just like extra tags like "alpha" and "beta".

They're a signal to IT folk to measure progress, and at least the perceived value of an upgrade (1.0 to 1.1 is a small change compared to 1.0 to 2.0). There's also expectations of compatibility. Files made with 1.0 should work with 1.1, but 2.0 might have breaking features that need to be looked into deeper.

Of course this varies with every single piece of software. You're right that for Chrome, it doesn't matter nearly as much, because updates are automatic. I just find it very interesting to see some software shoot up quick (maybe a 1.0 after 6 months), and then other software takes a lot longer (vlc taking years and years to hit 1.0).

Wine springs to mind here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com