I guess at this point version 9 looks OK. You have MSIE 9, Opera 10 etc and we've grown accustomed to those. It's up there at the same level and not particularly out of place.
Now look back: the public stable release of Chrome 1 was on 11 December 2008. That's roughly 5 up per year. In another year it will be 15 and then 20. After a while it will start looking silly (like it did with MS Office) and I don't think the question is if they will stop with this aggressive version-numbering, but when.
They now have beaten IE to the release of version 9, they will beat Opera for version 11. I'm guessing once they have beaten all the other browsers they will stop and get back to point-releases like everyone else.
But not until they are ahead of the curve and say "Your browser only goes to 9 or 10? My browser goes to version 11!". In lack of better words: Pointless or not, I'm guessing they want their browser to be the one which goes to 11, Spinaltap style.
The number is all a mind-trick and you have to be a fool not to see the game being played here.
I disagree, the number is there to indicate a version, nothing more. The version number in Chrome is not exposed to users in a marketing way.
Google simple decided to go for big version numbers, because what does switching from 2.95 to 3.0 mean if you release new features constantly and major steps thus never happen?
Sticking to decimal point version numbers makes no sense in this case.
If you use semantic versioning (http://semver.org/), switching from 2.95 to 3.0 means you made backwards-incompatible changes. Major features could still happen in a point release.
Now look back: the public stable release of Chrome 1 was on 11 December 2008. That's roughly 5 up per year. In another year it will be 15 and then 20. After a while it will start looking silly (like it did with MS Office) and I don't think the question is if they will stop with this aggressive version-numbering, but when.
They now have beaten IE to the release of version 9, they will beat Opera for version 11. I'm guessing once they have beaten all the other browsers they will stop and get back to point-releases like everyone else.
But not until they are ahead of the curve and say "Your browser only goes to 9 or 10? My browser goes to version 11!". In lack of better words: Pointless or not, I'm guessing they want their browser to be the one which goes to 11, Spinaltap style.
The number is all a mind-trick and you have to be a fool not to see the game being played here.