Firefox Developers to Shorten Release Cycle

Today, the developers announced that they are shortening the release cycle. Starting in 2020, the next stable version of Firefox will be released every 4 weeks.

Over the past years, Firefox development has looked something like this:

• Nightly 93 (development of new features)
• Developer Edition 92 (new capability readiness assessment)
• Beta 91 (bug fix)
• Current Release 90 (fixing critical bugs until the next release)

Every 6 weeks there is a shift one step down:

• beta becomes release
• Developer Edition with disabled features that the developers considered not ready enough, turns into beta
• a slice of Nightly is made, which becomes the Developer Edition

Talk about shortening this cycle walkedat least 8 years. A short cycle will allow you to quickly respond to market requirements and give you more flexibility in planning. Users and web application developers will be able to get new features and APIs faster.

Long Term Support Release (ESR) frequency will not change. New major versions of ESR are planned to be released every 12 months. After the release of the new version, the previous one, as now, will be supported for another 3 months to give organizations time to migrate.

Shortening the development cycle inevitably means less beta testing time. To prevent quality degradation, the following measures are planned:

• beta releases will not be generated twice a week, as now, but daily (as in Nighly).
• the practice of gradually rolling out new features that are considered high-risk, capable of seriously affecting the user experience will continue (for example, developers gradually turned on blocking automatic sound playback in new tabs for users and were ready to turn it off at any time if there were any problems; now the same scheme is used to test the inclusion of the default DNS-over-HTTPS for some users from the USA).
• A / B testing of small changes on “live” users is also not going anywhere, based on these experiments, developers decide whether to change something in a particular area.

Firefox 4-6 will be the first releases to be 71 instead of 72 weeks apart. Firefox 72 release is planned as of January 7, 2020.

Source: linux.org.ru