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Firefox 4 was a pretty big release for Mozilla – the user interface changed to put the tabs on top (very Chrome-like), Firefox Sync, WebGL, GPU acceleration, and lots more HTML5 and CSS3. So far, so good.

Firefox, for a long time my favourite browser, has been losing ground (in my mind at least) to Chrome, which launches in seconds rather than minutes, is easy to search and synchronises across the three computers I regularly use. Maybe it was the bloatedness of all the extensions, maybe familiarity had bred contempt, I don’t know, but Chrome was my new favourite browser.

Firefox 4 didn’t exactly change that, but it has made me more open to using Firefox. However, after the excitement leading up to a new version of Firefox, Mozilla announced that Firefox 5 would be coming out in June 2011, barely 3 months after the release of FF4.

Now browser version numbers can be tricky. Microsoft took 5 years to go from Internet Explorer 6 to 7. Now that’s a release cycle that could have been shorter. However, since then there have been new versions every couple of years, a decent length of time for the next version to be a proper update with new features.

Safari goes at a similar pace: announced in 2003, we’re now on version 5. Chrome leaves them all in the dust though – since its launch in September 2008, we’ve had 12 new versions, with 13 and 14 in the pipeline.

Google are working on a three-month release cycle, and this is the model Firefox have switched to. That’s all very well, but it means there will no longer be distinctive versions for web developers to support or drop support for. Google has an automatic update process, and you can be pretty sure that Firefox users are savvy enough to upgrade, but the worry is you may get users who are using a six month old version of the browser that doesn’t render your webpage right. And no developer can afford the time to test on 8 or 10 different versions of the same browser (we have enough of that with IE).

So what’s the answer? Well, we have to deal with it. FF and Chrome will release every three months, with new features and new capabilities. And as a web designer, I need to make sure that the sites I develop are simply well-coded. Robust code will use the available enhancements and fall back to simpler but still great-looking and functioning webpages.

Does the release of multiple versions of browsers worry you? What safeguards do you have in place to test browser compatibility?

Tags: browser, chrome, firefox, internet explorer, safari

This entry was posted by Chris Marsh on Monday, July 11th, 2011 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.