No one is saying that the day a feature is released that it will be widely adopted. CSS animations, for example, can be incorporated in sites, and as performance improves, etc it will become more widely used. Some "features" are simply performance improvements (e.g. GPU acceleration, better JS JIT, WebGL improvements; Chrome added software WebGL support on the last update).
Developers will be able to clean up their CSS more often (e.g. -webkit-border-radius, -moz-border-radius => border-radius). Sure, somethings will be only for developers at first but after a burn-in and Chrome/Firefox adoption, certain features and techniques will become mainstream. IE users will get the more "generic" page. Not a lot can be done about that.
Finally, let me add that it reduces testing for developers because now you only have to test on one version of Firefox. FF 3.6 is under %3 market share, and it was retired today.
As for the not freezing, that's a different unrelated issue. I've been running the Firefox and Chrome nightly's for a year and I'm pretty happy with both.
I understand what you're saying, I really do. I just think we would do better as an industry -- in the sense of producing more real world projects that benefit real world users sooner -- if instead of everyone having an anatomical measurement contest about version numbers, we slowed down the pace of releases but tried to standardise the useful new features within a release cycle or two. There is no advantage to anyone in having essentially the same feature available in, say, Gecko and Webkit, but subtly different syntax so all the CSS has to be written twice. There is no advantage to anyone in having HTML5 video, but Google being unable to make up its mind about whether H.264 is the de facto standard because it's better than everything else or the spawn of Satan because of the patent concerns. And so on...
That again a different problem unrelated to rapid updates.
Yes, I agree it would be great if everyone converged on standards sooner. If we agree on the one true standard to create a linear-gradient, for example, then we shouldn't have to wait 2 years to get it implemented.
Btw, you are supporting all those Opera extensions too, right? :-(
Developers will be able to clean up their CSS more often (e.g. -webkit-border-radius, -moz-border-radius => border-radius). Sure, somethings will be only for developers at first but after a burn-in and Chrome/Firefox adoption, certain features and techniques will become mainstream. IE users will get the more "generic" page. Not a lot can be done about that.
Finally, let me add that it reduces testing for developers because now you only have to test on one version of Firefox. FF 3.6 is under %3 market share, and it was retired today.
As for the not freezing, that's a different unrelated issue. I've been running the Firefox and Chrome nightly's for a year and I'm pretty happy with both.