Google to Skip Chromium 82 Because of Coronavirus
- Paul Thurrott
- Mar 23, 2020
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After hitting pause on Chromium 81 because of the Coronavirus pandemic, Google now says it will skip Chromium 82 as well.
“Our top objective is to keep trunk/master in a stable, reliable state,” Google engineer Jason Kersey originally wrote last week in a post to the Chromium group in Google Groups. “This means in practice we will not be promoting new milestones to stable during this period and that the scheduled release of [Chromium] 81 will stay on hold pending our decision to resume releases.”
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For Chromium 82, Google originally said that it would release one more Dev channel build to gather more stability data. But that’s over, and Google is now skipping past Chromium 82 as well.
“We will abandon current [Chromium] 82 branches, remove infra support, and stop testing/merges to the branches,” Kersey wrote in a follow-up. “We will not push any new [Chromium] 82 releases to Dev, and we will stop stabilization for Beta. We will move [the] Dev channel to [Chromium] 83 ASAP. [And] we will keep the Beta channel on [Chromium] 81 until [Chromium] 83 is ready to be promoted.
What this means is that Google’s next planned release is Chromium 83, for which it will continue shipping daily Canary builds as planned. And that, in turn, will impact not just Chrome but other Chromium-based browsers as well, including Microsoft Edge.
“We expect to provide another update next week around our anticipated next steps and timing around releasing [Chromium] 81, and branching for [Chromium] 83,” Kersey continues. “Thanks again for your patience and support.”