Till now similar to Chrome, Mozilla releases major Firefox version every 6-8 weeks, this to change to 4 weeks in 2020. The company says they’ll adjust Firefox release cadence to increase their agility and bring new features quickly.
Mozilla reveals the reason for the change in a blog post: “we’ve had many requests to take features to market sooner. Feature teams are increasingly working in Sprints that align better with shorter release cycles. Considering these factors, it is time we changed our release cadence”.
Firefox 74 is the first Firefox version to come out after spending 28 days in development and is scheduled to ship in Q1 2020 on March 03.
The organization says shorter release cycles provide “greater flexibility to support product planning and priority changes due to market or business requirements” . The company assures they’ll apply “the same rigor and due diligence needed for high quality and stable release”.
The 4-week release cycle will impact Beta releases as well. Generally, Mozilla releases two beta builds every week, this will change and there will be more frequent beta builds similar to Nightly.
The company still believes staged rollouts is the best practice to ship features. There is no change in that.
Staged rollouts of features will be a continued best practice. This approach helps minimize unexpected (quality, stability or performance) disruptions to our release end-users. For instance, if a feature is deemed high-risk, we will plan for slow rollout to end-users and turn the feature off dynamically if needed.
Mozilla has updated Firefox release schedule for 2019-2020, check out that below.
Why is Mozilla looks so hurried in shipping new Firefox to users? How this affects the browser’s stability and performance? Does this mean browser comes with more bugs? What do you say about this?
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