That's an interesting thought. It's almost like Chrome and Firefox have been in a "browser cold war" for years now, trying to outdo each other's version numbers, trying to entice users with greener grass rather than the stronger "attacks" of the IE-Firefox "browser wars" of the past, and one side trying to imitate the other.

Chrome realized that if it jumped ahead in version number, it could gain a huge PR advantage, and then Firefox was forced to follow that pattern or appear outdated. Users may have gained some rapid iteration, but in the long term, I think we lost the ability to understand how the browsers are changing (of course, some of that is a matter of the inherent complexity explosion in the Web).

And once you change to the constantly-incremented version numbering scheme, how can you ever go back to something more meaningful? Who's would blink first?

Happily, Pale Moon, for example, retains more modest version numbers. I hope their developers continue doing well. Imagine if it (or a similar project) were the next Phoenix, the way Firefox rose from Netscape's ashes.