Think a New Firefox Every Six Weeks Is too Fast? Mozilla Wants to Move Even Faster

Many believe that the six weeks development cycle of Firefox is too fast, but some Mozilla devs believe it's not fast enough. In fact, there are talks of switching to an even faster five week release cycle.

This would mean that a new Firefox would arrive every five weeks, but it would also mean that new features would arrive three weeks faster than they currently do, since the change would cut one week from each dev channel, Nighly, Aurora and Beta.

"Moving to a five week cycle would mean a fix going into mozilla-central would get to users three weeks faster. That's a big deal," Josh Aas writes in Mozilla development mailing list.

"It's an upgrade in responsiveness that we can't afford to pass on if we can pull it off," he said.

There is some support for this change and Mozilla is not flat-out rejecting it, but most devs are cautious about another move especially since many Firefox users are not yet over the pain of moving to the fast, six weeks schedule.

"Yes, I absolutely think in the future we will shorten the cycle--but it won't be soon. We have some work to do to make 6 weeks smooth from a process, tool, and product side," Christian Legnitto, Firefox's release manager, wrote.

However, he believes Mozilla still needs some time to make sure that the rapid release cycle is working as intended. The truth is, Firefox 6 was the only release to go through the whole process. Firefox 7 is coming in less than a week though.

Once Mozilla is satisfied that it can push new versions once every six weeks without a hitch it can think about moving to a faster schedule. And if it does, it plans to announce it well in advance.

Legnitto also had some interesting insight on how the switch to the rapid release cycle is going. So far, only about two thirds of Firefox users are running Firefox 5, 6 or 7.

However, he said that this is because Mozilla hasn't moved to drop support for Firefox 3.6 yet. When it does and when it prompts users to switch to the latest stable release, Legnitto believes Firefox 3.6 will be gone within weeks.