Google is Speeding Up the Chrome Release Schedule

HarborFront

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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.”

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.

 

Lenny_Fox

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Google had to do something, Microsoft Edge is the better version of Chrome in terns of:

Security: Auto De-elevation of broker process and Code Integrity Signing of renderer process
Privacy: Auto delete of history at browser exit and build-in tracking protection
Speed: Startup booster (Edge is already preloaded at system start) for faster application start

Increasing speed of development cycle means increasing the UNpatched time frame for other chromium based browsers
 

Gandalf_The_Grey

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On Ghacks:

What about other Chromium-based browsers?​

Many third-party browsers are based on Chromium, including Vivaldi, Opera, Brave or Microsoft's Edge web browser. The browser makers are impacted by Google's decision to speed up the release cycle and have two main options at this point:
  • Follow Google's example and speed up the delivery of updates as well to a 4-week release cycle.
  • Switch to the Stable Extended release cycle and delay releases by 2-weeks.
Not all browser makers follow Google Chrome releases closely, but releases are tied to Chromium's development nevertheless. Another possibility could be to implement security patches as they become available, but divert from Google's release cycle otherwise.

We contacted several browser makers and will update the article once we get replies.
 

SeriousHoax

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4 weeks release cycle is something Firefox has also done a few months ago. Many users were thinking, they just did it, so they can catch Chrome in terms of version number. Haha, surely that's not the case, but it's funny that now with this change from Google, Firefox probably can't catch Chrome anymore. Firefox is on 86 at the moment and Chrome on 89.
Anyway, I just hope Chrome don't rush in to push new features and improvements quickly as they have less time for testing now.
 

Gandalf_The_Grey

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Will be interesting to follow what the major chromium-based browsers will do.
Stay in sync with Stable (updates every 4 weeks) or move to Extended Stable (updates every 8 weeks).
Extended Stable will be available to enterprise administrators and Chromium embedders who need additional time to manage updates. Security updates on Extended Stable will be released every two weeks to fix important issues, but those updates won’t contain new features or all security fixes that the 4 week option will receive.
This could mean that for the best security there will be no other option than Chrome, because Extended Stable will not contain all security fixes from Stable 🤔
We will see in Q3 starting with Chrome 94.

Article about the original subject at The Verge:
 
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Gandalf_The_Grey

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Microsoft will follow:
 

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