The developers behind Mozilla’s newest Firefox browser, Firefox 6, received a cupcake from their rivals as a token of appreciation.
Director of Engineering at Mozilla, Jonathan Nightingale, said that the cake, which was given by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, arrived on the day that the Firefox 6 was launched earlier this month.
“Every time Mozilla releases a version of Firefox, the IE team sends us a cake. They’re cool like that,” Nightingale said in his Flicker account, where he posted the picture of the congratulatory cupcake. “As the releases have gotten faster and leaner… so have the cakes.”
With the new rapid release development cycle of Firefox, the Internet Explorer team of Microsoft has downsized the usual congratulatory cake that it sends to its rival. The first cake was sent by the Internet Explorer team in 2008, when Mozilla shipped Firefox 3. Microsoft also sent a cake in March after Mozilla shipped the Firefox 4, and in June, they sent a smaller cupcake after the release of Firefox 5.
Under the rapid-release development program, new browser versions are released every six weeks. This means the change in features from earlier versions is smaller. Maybe this is one reason why Microsoft sent a smaller cupcake, instead of a bigger-sized cake that they used to.
Microsoft is currently working on the Internet Explorer 10, where a beta version is expected to be released at the company’s BUILD developer conference in September.
We wonder if Mozilla will return the favour?
via: Winrumors
I suppose it's no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to Firefox development for the past several years, but for fuck's sake, listen to your users and stop with the version number inflation! Seriously, what makes this a Firefox 6 and not a Firefox 4.2? What new features does it add? Apparently the only really "stand-out" feature is graying out anything that isn't the domain name in the useless-bar. I mean, Awesome Bar. You have lost a lot of users for these. Many of my friends have switched to chrome or Avant browser.