These really do reflect the most significant releases of each browser, regardless of arbitrary major/minor/micro version number changes... Firefox 3.6 was as major a release in that universe as Chrome 8 was in theirs.
The point, which you seem determined to not get, is that the "major release" designation is an arbitrary one, and some major releases have more scope than others.
Which is what Tyrannosaurs said. Then you objected to something he didn't actually say....
Absolutely - Chrome 7 wasn't far off a bug fix release (also contained some improvements to HTML5 support but little in the way of new end user features) but it's clearly not the same order as the IE releases which aren't far off ground up rewrites with new UIs and so on.
See, that's where I disagree: a ground up rewrite with a new user interface gets the web precisely nowhere, particularly after years without a release.
Chrome 7 was a significant release. Hundreds of bug fixes truly means something (imagine if there were an IE6.5 with hundreds of bug fixes). The HTML5 parser is a huge deal, plus File API, late-binding SSL... all of these are about delivering actual benefits to web developers and users.
And that's why my retort to a mostly silly discussion was that Modern Browsers Ship. Because delivering a better web to developers and users is the whole damned point. Anything else is masturbatory.
So go ahead, be as picky as you want about what's major and what's minor. You'll just be missing the entire point. :-)
