Version 22 of Mozilla’s web browser was released yesterday, with the usual utter lack of anything approaching a proper announcement. The closest we got was a post on the Mozilla blog entitled “Firefox Delivers 3D Gaming, Video Calls and File Sharing to the Web“. That post discusses some of the new features of Firefox 22, but never actually mentions the new version number. I understand that Mozilla is trying to place less importance on version numbers, but in my opinion this is going too far.

Making things even more confusing, the main download page for Firefox never mentions the current version, although all the download links point to version 22 URLs, which you can see by hovering your mouse over them.

The release notes page is still a confusing mess. The first text you read on that page is “Firefox Notes (First offered to release channel users on June 25, 2013)”. It sounds like they’re saying that Firefox was released on June 25, 2013. What they really mean is that Firefox version 22 was released on June 25, 2013, but the version isn’t mentioned in the title. In fact, the only reference to the version is in a contributor “thank you” note below the title. Below that, the “What’s New” section lists changes made to Firefox, which we can only assume are specific to version 22 because the page’s URL includes the text “22.0”.

A link on the release notes page for version 22 titled “complete list of changes” now points to a list of bugs in Mozilla’s bug tracking system, Bugzilla. The list of bugs shown is huge, and although each of the 510 entries supposedly represents a bug fixed in version 22, the information is highly technical and not really intended for regular users. A proper change list is nowhere to be found.

Somewhat more useful are the confusingly-named and well hidden “known vulnerabilities” and “security advisories” pages for Firefox. The first of those pages lists security vulnerabilities and the versions of Firefox in which they were fixed, including version 22. The second page lists Firefox security vulnerabilities by the date on which they were first reported by Mozilla, with no indication of which vulnerabilities have been fixed, or when they were fixed.

I’ve been pointing out the lack of proper version announcement resources for Firefox here and in other online forums for a while now, but have yet to see any significant progress.