Google announced today that it will shorten the Chrome release schedule from every six weeks to every four weeks.
“For more than a decade, Chrome has shipped a new milestone every 6 weeks, delivering security, stability, speed and simplicity to our users and the web,” Google’s Alex Mineer writes. “As we have improved our testing and release processes for Chrome, and deployed bi-weekly security updates to improve our patch gap, it became clear that we could shorten our release cycle and deliver new features more quickly. Because of this, we are excited to announce that Chrome is planning to move to releasing a new milestone every 4 weeks, starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021.”
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Google is also adding what it calls an Extended Stable option, which will provide milestone updates every 8 weeks. This will be available to enterprise administrators and Chromium embedders who need additional time to manage updates, Google says.
And this change will impact Chrome OS, as well, though Google is being a bit vague on the details.
“For users on Chrome OS, we also plan to support multiple stable release options,” Mineer says. “We’ll have more to share with Chrome OS administrators in the coming months about the choices you’ll have for milestone updates to your managed devices.”
Naturally, one wonders whether Microsoft will switch to a four-week release schedule for the Chromium-based Edge browser or stick with the current six-week schedule. No word yet on that.
dftf
<p><em>"[…]</em><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> Chrome is planning to move to releasing a new milestone every 4 weeks!"</em></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Given web-browsers usually auto-update silently in the background, and can often do-so multiple times a week, is this move really a big thing? I guess it lines up with things like Windows, macOS and Android (at-least for Pixel phones) which all do updates on a four-week basis — but they also don't often drop random-updates in-between. So… okay, sure, why not, I guess?</span></p><p><br></p><p><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">"Google is also adding what it calls an Extended Stable option, which will provide milestone updates every 8 weeks"</em></p><p>As an enterprise, if you might be better-off with the <em>Firefox ESR </em>releases, instead. They typically only do a major-update once-a-year, with just security-patches in-between.</p><p><br></p><p><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">"Naturally, one wonders whether Microsoft will switch to a four-week release schedule for […] Edge"</em></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Of course they will; Edge usually gets updates at the same time as Google Chrome. Whether other Chromium browsers, like </span><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Brave, Opera and Vivaldi</em><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">, will follow-suit though I don't know.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">[Edit: removed Safari from the list of Chromium browsers]</span></p>
dftf
<blockquote><em><a href="#616578">In reply to richardbottiglieri:</a></em></blockquote><p>I stand corrected… appears <em>WebKit </em>came first, and <em>Blink </em>(which all "Chromium browsers" used) was forked from that.</p><p><br></p><p>Oddly though, the <em>Wikipedia </em>article "Comparison of browser engines", reckons that <em>Blink </em>is supported on every OS including <em>Windows</em>. I'm guessing that must mean that <em>iTunes for Windows </em>uses <em>Blink </em>in the background or something then, as <em>Safari for Windows </em>was killed-off many-years-ago now…</p>