Developers haven’t been able to cope up with Firefox’s 6 week rapid Release cycle, what about users ?version bump after every 42 days with addition of no significant new features not satisfying them either? Mozilla development team wants to take a break in last couple of weeks of Dec, 2012 to spend time with their family and prepare for the new year as a result of that Mozilla changes their release calendar by extending 11/19/2012 -12/31/2012 cycle by a week.
Due to this adjustment Firefox 18, 19, and 20 will spend extra week in development before release which makes 7 week release for these versions. After the following cycle will be 6 weeks one.
Firefox 18 release date changes, Firefox 16 and 17’s remains same
No changes in Firefox 16 and 17 release dates they were scheduled to release on October 8th and November 9th this year respectively. Due to these changes Mozilla able to offer support for Firefox 17 for an additional week, that makes total of 7 weeks support.
However Firefox 18 to release in the week of Jan 6th 2013 and as usual Firefox 19 to release either on Feb 18th or 19th of 2013. You can check Firefox rapid release calendar with these changes here.
Mozilla promises that they maintain a responsive team to address new issues if any that arises during the two week break period.
Update: Wrongly reported information has been corrected.