Mozilla Rejects Faster Firefox Release Schedule

A pitch to accelerate Firefox’s rapid release schedule even further i.e. shipping a new version every five weeks, was rejected by Mozilla. The proposal, made by Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas last week, would have cut weeks from the current scheme.

Moving to a five week cycle would mean a fix going into mozilla central would get to users three weeks faster. That’s a big deal. It’s an upgrade in responsiveness that we can’t afford to pass on if we can pull it off. – Josh Aas, Mozilla engineering manager, on the mozilla.dev.planning forum

The reaction by Mozilla contributors, developers, and managers to Aas’ proposal was almost universally negative, with reasons ranging from developer burnout and testing times for enterprises being too short to the current lack of an automatic, behind the scenes update mechanism as is the case with Chrome.

Nevertheless, while the consensus seemed to be that moving to a five week schedule was a bad idea at the moment, Mozilla left the topic up for discussion.

Yes, I absolutely think in the future we will shorten the cycle, but it won’t be soon. We have some work to do to make 6 weeks smooth from a process, tool, and product side. When we get 6 weeks down to a science we can shorten as needed. – Christian Legnitto, the Mozilla manager who oversees Firefox releases