> I can't imagine why anyone -- users or developers -- would care what version number it's up to.
One reason is that while Chrome's UI may look much the same, its behaviour often changes significantly, and not always for the better.
They broke CSS3 rounded corners just as web designers were starting to use them instead of graphics.
They made a political decision to remove H.264 support just as the HTML5 video tag was starting to gain traction.
There is a reason technical communities develop standards. Unfortunately, the web development community has completely lost the plot in recent years. The W3C have become so slow and politicised that they have become irrelevant. The browser vendors are moving so fast that no-one can keep up.
No-one can actually use all of these state-of-the-art features in serious projects anyway, because they don't work in most browsers. As keen as web developers are for long-standing pain points to get fixed and to play with new toys, to get the job done you still have to use the old tried-and-tested techniques anyway as a fall-back for all the browsers that don't support the latest cool stuff. If you have to do that anyway, there isn't much point to using most of that cool stuff in the first place.
If you search the Chromium bug database under "rounded corners", you'll find various issues related to poor antialiasing or worse, with screenshots attached.
Basically, rounded corners weren't rendering smoothly, and if there was a border applied then you could even get the wrong colours showing, which looked awful.
One reason is that while Chrome's UI may look much the same, its behaviour often changes significantly, and not always for the better.
They broke CSS3 rounded corners just as web designers were starting to use them instead of graphics.
They made a political decision to remove H.264 support just as the HTML5 video tag was starting to gain traction.
There is a reason technical communities develop standards. Unfortunately, the web development community has completely lost the plot in recent years. The W3C have become so slow and politicised that they have become irrelevant. The browser vendors are moving so fast that no-one can keep up.
No-one can actually use all of these state-of-the-art features in serious projects anyway, because they don't work in most browsers. As keen as web developers are for long-standing pain points to get fixed and to play with new toys, to get the job done you still have to use the old tried-and-tested techniques anyway as a fall-back for all the browsers that don't support the latest cool stuff. If you have to do that anyway, there isn't much point to using most of that cool stuff in the first place.