Today, the developers announced that they will reduce the release preparation cycle. Starting from 2020, the next stable version of Firefox will be released every 4 weeks.
- Nightly 93 (development of new features)
- Developer Edition 92 (evaluation of new feature readiness)
- Beta 91 (bug fixes)
- Current Release 90 (critical bug fixes until the next release)
Every 6 weeks, there is a shift downwards:
- beta becomes a release
- Developer Edition with disabled features deemed not ready by developers turns into beta
- Nightly is cut, becoming Developer Edition
Discussions about shortening this cycle have been ongoing, at least for the last 8 years. A shorter cycle will allow for quicker responses to market demands and provide greater flexibility in planning. Users and web application developers will be able to access new features and APIs more rapidly.
The frequency of releases with long-term support (ESR) will remain unchanged. New major versions of ESR are planned to be released every 12 months. After the release of a new version, the previous one will, as now, be supported for another 3 months to give organizations time to transition.
Shortening the development cycle inevitably means less time for beta testing. To prevent a decline in quality, the following measures are planned:
- beta releases will be formed not twice a week as currently, but daily (like Nightly).
- the practice of gradually rolling out new features considered high-risk, which could significantly impact user experience, will continue (for example, developers gradually enabled users to block autoplay of sound in new tabs and were prepared to disable it at any moment if problems arose; currently, a similar scheme is being tested with some users in the U.S. for enabling DNS-over-HTTPS by default).
- A/B testing of small changes on 'live' users will also continue; based on these experiments, developers will decide whether to change something in a given area.
The first releases, which will have a gap of 4 weeks instead of 6, will be Firefox 71 and 72. The release of Firefox 72 is scheduled is scheduled for January 7, 2020.
Source: linux.org.ru
