On Thursday, Chrome Operations Technical Program Manager Alex Mineer revealed in a Chromium blog post that the team behind the world's biggest browser is planning to shorten the time between updates from six weeks to just four. weeks. Stable versions of Chrome have been updating every six weeks for over a decade, but starting with Chrome 94 in Q2021 XNUMX, that will finally change.
"As we improve our testing and release processes for Chrome, and deploy bi-weekly security updates to improve our patch gap (where security bug fixes are posted to our open source repository, but then it takes some time before release as a Chrome Stable Update), it was clear that we could shorten our release cycle and deliver new features faster," explained Mineer in the blog post.
Google Chrome: Faster General and Security Updates
This is the new overview of the official Chrome release cycle page on the Chromium website:
Chrome will ship a new stable release every four weeks, counting from the previous update. Chrome will also keep all other updates for an additional four weeks, supporting important security fixes to create an extended stable channel where a new update is sent every eight weeks.
During the first four weeks both the stable and extended stable versions are shipped, these versions available for companies can be activated through corporate policies.
Biweekly updates are pushed to the stable and extended stable channels to deploy security fixes (along with selected low-risk regression fixes) and keep the Chrome patch interval short.
Chrome 88 update fixes yet another "zero-day" bug
Chrome users will soon receive a new stable version of the browser every month, but Google is also introducing an extended option for enterprise admins and Chromium embeds that will deliver milestone updates every eight weeks instead of four.
Those going to Extended Stable releases will still get security updates every two weeks, but they won't have all the features and fixes of the standard Stable releases. Finally, for Chrome OS users, Google says it plans to support "multiple stable version options" and will have more to share with Chrome OS admins on the subject in the coming months.
