Firefox 5

[Harrison]

They would have been better to either adopt a dot point release scheme for more major updates, or a Windows style service pack approach. In my mind whole version number changes don't explain the importance of each update.

[Shoonay]

I don't care about the numbering system, they might as well call it Firefox 999.888.777, that's only the name.
It's great they finally devided the development to few smaller testing groups, unlike before when they only did stable release and beta/alpha/trunk_release in one.
People need to see that something's going on, not many folks are browsing their forums for development news.
The 4th version took way too long to develop, over 9 months...

BTW: Get ready for the 6th update soon, the 1st beta was released yesterday, they moved the 7th version to aurora already, AND started working on the 8th version. IIRC, the 8th version will FINALLY have tabs in separate processes.

[Demon Cleaner]

If you're asking me, I also don't care about the numbering system, only that I find it odd and unnecessary like they do at the moment. But not to the point that it would bother me.

[Bloodwych]

The thing about the new numbering system is that older versions, like 3.x, get left behind quicker and perhaps support dropped sooner? I'd imagine they were tired of people hanging on to the last major release so want to make that line between versions harder to recognize and hopefully get more to update sooner. It has plus points and negative.

System Administrators, Website designers and Addon authors have to move faster to stay compatible and keep up with the constant changes, changes which are harder to identify.

With the old version number system, it was easy to tell when a major new release needed close attention and testing of addons, software and hardware compatibility (v4 onwards requires SSE2, Athlon XP goodbye or stick with v3). Now it's harder to know when a major release is a major release, or a minor update like v4 to v5.

Yes a number is just a number, but the old system just made more sense to me and was more useful to give users a heads up on major changes.