Time is a funny thing, and the older you get the funnier it becomes: summers pass in the blink of an eye, and entire years vanish before you even noticed their arrival.
It's happening to me, too: the release of Firefox 12 feels as if it happened just days ago, and yet here I am, looking at a press release announcing the beta release of Firefox 13.
Version on the ridiculous
Software version numbers are important, because they tell you what's happening. Version 1.0 means "run away! run away!" because you just know it's got more bugs than a tramp's pants. Version 1.1 is the first big bug fix, 1.5 is the first reasonably stable one and version 1.10313112 is numberwang.
With browser numbers, though, it's all gone to pot. While Microsoft, Opera and Apple generally keep the big numbers for big releases, Mozilla and Google have gone crazy. Now, a brand new version number doesn't mean oodles of new features; it means that the browser maker's fixed a typo in the About page and slightly rounded the corner of an icon.
The problem, I think, is that all the really big stuff in browser development has already happened: browsers are fairly mature technology now, whereas in previous years you'd get genuinely new and big stuff such as tabbed browsing or dramatically faster rendering engines.
Now, though, any developments are incremental and under the hood - and that means that the different versions all blend into one another. By giving each minor update a major revision number, though, it's all gone a bit playground. "What version is your browser?" "Nineteen!" "Well, screw you! Our one's number eleventy-two! And my dad's a policeman!"
