Sylvestre Ledru, director of engineering at Mozilla, has recently announced a major change in the release cycle for Firefox. Moving forward, the popular web browser will transition to a two-week release cycle starting in September. This means that new releases will be generated every two weeks instead of the previous four-week cycle. This decision has already been reflected in the release schedule, with the last 4-week development cycle being Firefox 154, scheduled for August 18th. Subsequently, Firefox 155 will be released on September 1, followed by Firefox 156 on September 15, and Firefox 157 on September 29.
The rationale behind shortening the release preparation cycle is to experiment with bringing new features to users more frequently, ensuring a more predictable release process, and reducing the burden on developers before releases. The change allows developers to be more flexible in completing unfinished features and allocating sufficient time to work without strict deadlines. Mozilla plans to closely monitor the impact of this shortened development cycle and make adjustments as necessary.
In a similar move, Google had previously announced its transition to a two-week development cycle for Chrome back in March. However, this does not apply to the publishing cycle of Extended Stable (every 8 weeks), Dev (1-2 times a week), and Canary (daily) builds. The shorter Chrome development cycle is set to begin on September 8, following the previous release schedule with Chrome 153. The objective of this change is to expedite the publishing of new features, bug fixes, and optimizations. It is anticipated that more frequent releases will not compromise quality, reduce the risk of update failures, and simplify debugging as each release will contain fewer changes.