14 DAY TRIAL // Back in September 2019, Mozilla released an announcement that so many people, especially users of Firefox, received with much excitement: the browser was supposed to move from a six-week release schedule to a four-week cycle.
In other words, major Firefox updates were no longer supposed to land every six weeks, but every four weeks. For users, this means they’re getting their hands on a new Firefox version faster without the need for running testing builds of the browser.
Mozilla promised in an announcement that the same rigorous testing would be performed for the final builds just like before.
“Shorter release cycles provide greater flexibility to support product planning and priority changes due to business or market requirements. With four-week cycles, we can be more agile and ship features faster, while applying the same rigor and due diligence needed for a high-quality and stable release,” the company said at that point.
Firefox 74, which landed in early March, was the first version that embraced this new schedule, and since then, new browser versions shipped every four weeks.
But with Mozilla stepping on the gas and cutting the time between stable builds, the beta cycle itself experienced some changes.
“We intend to roll out fixes to them as quickly as possible. Today, we produce two Beta builds per week. Going forward, we will move to more frequent Beta builds, similar to what we have today in Firefox Nightly,” Mozilla said last September.
And while the company has indeed managed to embrace this four-week release schedule, not the same thing can be said about the rigorous testing that it promised. And the last three Firefox updates are living proof in this regard.
“Firefox 76 rollout suspended. Firefox 77 rollout suspended. Firefox 78 rollout suspended.”
Firefox 76 was the first major update that caused problems, including crashes on Windows 7. The Amazon Assistant and other add-ons also worked incorrectly after this update, so Mozilla decided to pause the rollout of the new browser version until a fix was developed. Firefox 76.0.1 was rolled out only a day later to resolve these problems.
Then, it was the turn of Firefox 77 to go live with critical issues. In this case, the browser shipped with a faulty DNS-over-HTTPS implementation, with Mozilla again deciding to suspend the rollout of the new browser until a fix was developed. Firefox 77.0.1 was also pushed the next day with a fix for the problem.
And now, it’s Firefox 78 the one that experienced pretty much the same thing. In this case, the browser broke down the search feature, with search engines going missing after the update. Once again, Mozilla had to halt the automatic rollout of the new version and ship an emergency update to version 78.0.1 to correct the problem.
All these seem to suggest that the accelerated release pace and the reduced period of testing in the beta channel might not necessarily be the right way to go for the browser that’s supposed to compete against the influx of Chromium apps.
Users expect nothing but smooth performance when installing Firefox, yet the number of issues experienced with the stable builds increased substantially after Mozilla switched to a four-week release cycle.
The problem here, however, might not come down just to the changes that the company announced for the Firefox release schedule. It’s not a secret that Mozilla has gone through some more difficult times lately, with tens of engineers let go as the company was trying to find new ways to make money.
Unfortunately, whatever is happening at Mozilla is eventually breaking down the experience with one of the world’s best browsers. And in the long term, this can’t be good news.
The world needs Firefox, but more than anything, it needs Firefox to just work.