No one cares about version numbers for web apps because you're always running the latest version. Since Chrome updates automatically, I think people will eventually treat it similarly. Instead of announcing a new version of Chrome, Google will just announce new features in Chrome that everyone using the browser will have. I don't think they'll ever refer to "Chrome 20" in public.

We already do this. Note that the public blog post does not contain the character "9" anywhere in it. It's only bloggers that insist on referring to the versions :)

Exactly, I'm getting tired of this line of argument. The major version number of chrome is virtually hidden from users. Unlike other browsers there is never branding or logos featuring the major version number and there are never big press releases trumpeting a change of version. Perhaps some day bloggers and commenters will finally notice this and give these lame arguments a rest.

They are just numbers. Here's how it works. The version number is four parts: major.minor.build.patch.

major.minor are used for each significant release and are set for marketing purposes. They are currently on a 12-week release cycle, where major is updated for each cycle.

build.patch are used for engineering purposes. They update the build value daily on trunk. Periodically, they create a release branch from trunk. On release branches, the build portion of the version is fixed and the patch value is incremented daily.

So for example, the upcoming release will be 9.0.597.something. Typically it takes them a couple weeks to get from beta to stable, so I expect 9.0 stable to be something like 9.0.597.33.

But, as I said, they're just numbers. :-)

They may be numbers, but each new number has awesome new features.

I wonder if they'll slow down on the major version now that they've "caught up" to IE...

Nope, they sped up to one version number every 6 weeks. Maybe they're trying to catch up to Emacs.

I can't imagine the branding looks as good for Chrome 23.0 as it does for single digits. Maybe they'll switch to code names.

Version numbers aren't very prominent for "regular" users. I don't think they really care about branding or marketing the version.