Firefox Developers about reducing the preparation cycle for new browser releases to four weeks (previously, releases were prepared in 6-8 weeks). Firefox 70 will be released on the old schedule on October 22, followed by Firefox 3 six weeks later on December 71, followed by subsequent releases once every four weeks (January 7, February 11, March 10, etc.).
The long-term support branch (ESR) will continue to be released once a year and will be supported for another three months after the formation of the next ESR branch. Corrective updates for the ESR branch will be synchronized with regular releases and will also be released every 4 weeks. The next ESR release will be Firefox 78, scheduled for June 2020. The development of SpiderMonkey and Tor Browser will also be switched to a 4-week release cycle.
The reason cited for shortening the development cycle is the desire to more quickly bring new features to users. More frequent releases are expected to provide greater flexibility in product development planning and implementation of priority changes to meet business and market demands. According to the developers, a four-week development cycle allows for an optimal balance between quickly delivering new Web APIs and ensuring quality and stability.
Reducing the time to prepare a release will lead to a decrease in testing time for beta releases, nightly builds and Developer Edition releases, which is planned to be compensated by more frequent generation of updates for test builds. Instead of preparing two new beta versions per week, it is planned to adapt the frequent update release scheme for the beta branch, previously used for nightly builds.
To reduce the risk of unforeseen problems when adding some significant innovations, the changes associated with them will not be communicated to users of releases at once, but gradually - first, the feature will be activated for a small percentage of users, and then brought to full coverage or dynamically disabled when defects are identified. In addition, to test innovations and make decisions about their inclusion in the main structure, the Test Pilot program will invite users to participate in experiments that are not tied to the release cycle.
Source: opennet.ru