Inflation is never a good thing. Not in the money markets, but not in other numbers either, including software version numbers. It seems Chrome has started a number war, though. In trying to catch up to the same version number as IE, they've gone from 1 in the beginning of 2009, to 9 two years later. Looking at the Timeline from WikiMedia, the major version bobbles are so crammed they overlap. IE on the other hand, took 16 years to get to the same number, where IE6 was responsible for five of those years. Now it looks like Mozilla wants to be part of the number game with Firefox. Apparently, they're planning four new major version releases this year.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg"]Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg[/caption]

At least they're still on numbers, though. The legacy of crazy OS names which Microsoft might have started with XP is still dreadful. "Crusty Cupcake", "Frozen Ginger Lion", "Snappy Lizard". Even if some of the schema follow alphabetical order, I still find it a lot easier to know which version comes next by simply looking at a +1 number. I guess I would not make it very far in the marketing department.