Company moves to a faster release cadence for the browser

Sep 18, 2019 06:14 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has announced a new release cycle for Firefox browser, with the company reducing the time for new versions from 6 weeks to just 4 weeks.

This means a new major update for Firefox should land every month, and Mozilla says it aims to implement the shorter release cycle in the first quarter of 2020.

As far as Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release for the enterprise) is concerned, no changes will happen here, the organization explains, so new major releases will continue to land every 12 months. This means the next major ESR version is projected to go live in June 2020 followed by another one in June 2021.

“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. Also, we put new features and implementation of new Web APIs into the hands of developers more quickly,” Ritu Kothari, Firefox release management team, and Yan Or, Product Integrity team for Firefox, explain.

New Firefox releases schedule

Firefox 70, which is the next major release for the browser, is due to see daylight on October 22, followed by Firefox 71 on December 3.

Beginning with the first month of 2020, however, Mozilla starts shipping new updates every four weeks, so after Firefox 72 on January 7, the company will roll out Firefox 73 on February 11. You can find the full release schedule in the photo embedded below.

Mozilla says the change won’t happen overnight and keeping an eye on the transition is a priority for the company in order to make sure that everything is going smoothly.

“We’ll watch aspects like release scope change; developer productivity impact (tree closure, build failures); beta churn (uplifts, new regressions); and overall release stabilization and quality (stability, performance, carryover regressions). Our main goal is to identify bottlenecks that prevent us from being more agile in our release cadence. Should our metrics highlight an unexpected trend, we will put in place appropriate mitigations,” the two Mozilla officials explain.

The new Firefox release cycle

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Firefox will receive major updates every four weeks
The new Firefox release cycle
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