Google to speed up Chrome’s release cycle to 4 weeks

New Delhi: Google has announced to shorten the release cycle of Chrome updates to four weeks from the current six-week period to improve security, speed and stability.

For more than a decade, Chrome has shipped a new update every 6 weeks.

“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,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Chrome is now planning to move to release a new milestone every 4 weeks, starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021.

Additionally, Google will add a new ‘Extended Stable’ option, with milestone 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,” Google said.

For users on Chrome OS, the company also plans to support multiple stable release options.

“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”.