Microsoft Edge to Adopt New Chrome Release Cycle Too
- Paul Thurrott
- Mar 12, 2021
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5
With Google Chrome moving to a new four-week release cadence, Microsoft says it will offer the same updating schedule for its own web browser.
“As contributors to the Chromium project, we look forward to the new 4-week major release cycle cadence that Google announced, to help deliver that innovation to our customers even faster,” the Microsoft Edge team writes. “For many, innovation can’t come fast enough. But that is not the case for all customers, particularly our enterprise customers who manage complex environments and must balance delivering new innovations against rigorous planning and testing.”
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To balance between the needs of different types of customers, Microsoft will move Edge to a new release cadence similar to that which Google will use. It will move the Edge release channels that are currently on a six-week schedule—Stable, Beta, and Dev—to the new four-week cycle. And it will introduce a new channel called Extended Stable that will provide a longer, 8-week release cycle.
“The 4-week cadence will be the default experience,” Microsoft notes. “Enterprise customers opting for the Extended Stable option will still get all the great innovation and security from the 4-week cycles, just delivered at a more manageable pace. In between major releases, customers choosing the Extended Stable option can expect a biweekly security update with the most important fixes; everything else will be delivered on the extended schedule every eight weeks.”
This makes tons of sense and seems like the right choice to me. And it won’t kick in until Microsoft starts developing Edge 94. (The current stable version is 89, so that’s still several months away.)