It probably implies "yet another Firefox release (without many significant user-facing changes)..."
There seems to be a general grudge among somewhat technically-minded people against the entire phenomenon of new Firefox releases since Firefox switched to its frequent release model.
Not at all. Most people don't care about the frequent updates. I certainly don't. I get a daily update. There's simply a section of the geek population that likes to whine loudly. If you don't like Firefox's update cycle switch to Chrome.
If you read my comment slowly, you'll note that I didn't express any dissatisfaction with Firefox updates, and said "somewhat technically-minded people", which corresponds to your definition of "a section of the geek population".
For the past year, Mozilla has never mentioned version numbers in the official announcements of new Firefox releases. For example, the Firefox 14 announcement:
Right, but the Firefox download page has the version number right on the download page. If/when auto-updating in the background works well, that should go away.
Probably the "big" list of brand new things, like putting another letter ("s") in the call to Google Search, implementing full screen for some of the Apple users, and implementing a feature that was available via plugins (click to play) since version... probably 2 or 1, can't remember.
