But why have they chosen to version their software like this, in contrast to every other browser? They could have gone with even numbered point releases.

As per the last paragraph of this post: http://blog.chromium.org/2010/07/release-early-release-often...

"Please don’t read too much into the pace of version number changes - they just mean we are moving through release cycles and we are geared up to get fresher releases into your hands!"

Thanks, but that actually addresses how they will be moving the whole version numbers up even faster than before, not how they've chosen to use whole version numbers to represent fairly minor milestones, in contrast to established practices.

Would you prefer Linux/SunOS-like version numbers where the major version never increments? When you do a release every 6-8 weeks, they're all going to be minor.

I guess at this point version 9 looks OK. You have MSIE 9, Opera 10 etc and we've grown accustomed to those. It's up there at the same level and not particularly out of place.

Now look back: the public stable release of Chrome 1 was on 11 December 2008. That's roughly 5 up per year. In another year it will be 15 and then 20. After a while it will start looking silly (like it did with MS Office) and I don't think the question is if they will stop with this aggressive version-numbering, but when.

They now have beaten IE to the release of version 9, they will beat Opera for version 11. I'm guessing once they have beaten all the other browsers they will stop and get back to point-releases like everyone else.

But not until they are ahead of the curve and say "Your browser only goes to 9 or 10? My browser goes to version 11!". In lack of better words: Pointless or not, I'm guessing they want their browser to be the one which goes to 11, Spinaltap style.

The number is all a mind-trick and you have to be a fool not to see the game being played here.

I disagree, the number is there to indicate a version, nothing more. The version number in Chrome is not exposed to users in a marketing way.

Google simple decided to go for big version numbers, because what does switching from 2.95 to 3.0 mean if you release new features constantly and major steps thus never happen? Sticking to decimal point version numbers makes no sense in this case.

If you use semantic versioning (http://semver.org/), switching from 2.95 to 3.0 means you made backwards-incompatible changes. Major features could still happen in a point release.