The company is changing its release process

Jul 23, 2010 11:07 GMT  ·  By

While users shouldn’t expect anything of biblical proportions, they should get ready for the upcoming flood of new Google Chrome downloads. Since the introduction of its open source browser in 2008, Google released new Chrome versions at a very rapid pace. The Mountain View-based search giant is already up to version 5.0 and working on 6.0 already. However, Google is actually looking to accelerate even more the pace at which it delivers Stable releases of Chrome to the public. According to the company, users will be seeing the changes in the coming months, as a new release process will be rolled out.

“ Running under ideal conditions, we will be looking to release a new stable version about once every six weeks, roughly twice as often as we do today,” revealed Anthony Laforge, Chrome Program Manager. “So why the change? We have three fundamental goals in reducing the cycle time: shorten the release cycle and still get great features in front of users when they are ready; make the schedule more predictable and easier to scope; reduce the pressure on engineering to “make” a release.”

Laforge explained that Google has no intention to make users wait months after months to start leveraging new features. This is the first reason driving the decision to accelerate releases as much as possible. “While pace is important to us, we are all committed to maintaining high quality releases — if a feature is not ready, it will not ship in a stable release,” he said.

Moving forward Google will act as a train station, and Chrome releases as trains. The modification coming to the release process will make it possible for users to predict just when new Chrome versions will become available. “The second goal is about implementing good project management practice. Predictable fixed duration development periods allow us to determine how much work we can do in a fixed amount of time, and makes schedule communication simple,” Laforge added.

At the same time, the Mountain View search giant is giving itself a tad more extra elbow room when it comes down to integrating new features into Chrome. This means that Google’s software engineers will no longer be required to wrap up the features that they are developing in a single release cycle. Before the changes, engineers could choose to work overtime to get a feature ready in time for a release; the entire Chrome version could be delayed until the new feature was finalized and integrated; or the incomplete addition was disabled, and postponed for the next Stable build. In the future, new features will simply be transitioned from one version of Chrome to the next if they are not ready in time.

“So, get ready to see us pick up the pace and for new features to reach the stable channel more quickly. Since we are going to continue to increment our major versions with every new release (i.e. 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0) those numbers will start to move a little faster than before. Please don’t read too much into the pace of version number changes - they just mean we are moving through release cycles and we are geared up to get fresher releases into your hands,” Laforge concluded.

Google Chrome 6.0.472.0 dev for Windows is available for download here.
Google Chrome 6.0.472.0 dev for Linux is
available for download here.

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