Chrome was three years old and on version 10.0 when this was published, and Firefox was on version 4.0 despite a decade of Mozilla legacy. It’s marketing, plain and simple, but I think it was the right decision.

The really important decision was to switch to a rapid, time-based release cycle from a traditional long, feature-based release cycle. We wanted to reduce the amount of work that was "fixed in the next release" but not yet shipped to users; to increase our responsiveness, so that if a new feature suddenly became important, we could quickly get it into the hands of users; and to avoid developer issues like schedule chicken and rushing to get not-really-done features into a release because the next release is far away. This change was indeed inspired by Chrome, and it worked well; those goals were achieved.

Then a much less important question was how to do version numbering in a world where you're doing these frequent releases. There is no technical reason why some releases should bump a major version number and others should not; the amount of new features or breaking changes will fluctuate from release to release, but the same kinds of changes are present in every release. It is therefore simpler to just have a uniform numbering scheme so no-one has to decide whether a release should bump the major version number, and users aren't trying to understand the difference between a major version bump and a minor version bump (when there isn't really a meaningful difference).

Then why have three parts to the version? You could just have the cycle version based on the schedule and a patch/fix subversion.

Intel's processor names already look ridiculous to me. Core i9-10980XE? Can't say that with a straight face, "normal" people seemed confused way back when Sandy Bridge got released

The difference also becomes less meaningful as the disparity grows. If Chrome is on version 78, and Firefox is on version 6 (or whatever), it's relatively intuitive that "versions" don't mean the same thing between the two. Same with the Playstation 3 versus Xbox 360, really.

Most people probably don't even know what version they're running, anyway.

That's why it was the Xbox 360 and not the Xbox 2, because XBox 2 < Playstation 3.

That felt to me like Microsoft deciding that their original concerns had never been legitimate.

I still think it was an awful branding decision, though.

Instead, Microsoft pretty much alienated their core gaming base in order to half-assedly fail at a broader goal. They didn't even manage to push through more than a couple of decent Kinect v2 games </ArmchairExecutive>

Ironically the PS 4 did outsell the X1 almost 2:1.

Users generally choose the phone, not the OS. And the most popular phones are pretty close on the numbering schemes.

Another example is SSL and TLS. SSL 3.0 was the last version, then TLS 1.0 took over, but a lot of people still thought SSL 3.0 was the latest and best.

Yeah...people are not that smart.

The 6-8 week schedule is about a decade old now. It's original goals were to help ensure that unrelated features didn't block each other from releasing, and make releases more consistent, which helps localization, testing, and project management. In that regard I think it's been very successful.

It's probably not worth nitpicking a decade old decision though.

If memory serves me right, the TLDR is that the more typical release management system can cause certain features to not be released as soon as they're ready, because other features that should go in a major release are not ready yet.

By removing the semantic component of release numbers and releasing often, this does not happen. Feature ready -> shipped soon.

[0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/09/moving-firefox-to-a-faster...