TECH NEWS – Mozilla is starting to speed up publishing its browser’s, Firefox‘ new builds, which means the version numbers might start to increase significantly in the next year…

In a blog post, Mozilla announced that their goal is to release a new build of Firefox every four weeks, regardless of the version (desktop or Android). That means their release cycle might be cut in half, as currently, they release a new version of Firefox every 6-8 weeks. This is an answer to expedite the delivery of new features to those who use Firefox. They will start accelerating the releases in the first quarter of 2020, starting with version 74.

„With four-week cycles, we can be more agile and ship features faster while applying the same rigour and due diligence needed for a high-quality and stable release. Also, we put new features and implementation of new web APIs [Application programming interface – the ed.] into the hands of developers more quickly. (This is what we’ve been doing recently with CSS spec implementations and updates, for instance.),” Mozilla says. They say that we’ll see something similar to Firefox Nightly with beta builds, meaning we will no longer get two new versions per week.

Mozilla may want to keep up with Google with this move. Their foundation, Chromium, is being used by Google Chrome, Opera (since 2013), and even Microsoft’s new browser, Edge. They say it’s not a good idea to see the industry lean towards a single foundation: „From a social, civic and individual empowerment perspective ceding control of fundamental online infrastructure to a single company is terrible. This is why Mozilla exists. We compete with Google not because it’s a good business opportunity. We compete with Google because the health of the internet and online life depend on competition and choice. They depend on consumers being able to decide we want something better and to take action,” Chris Beard, the CEO of Mozilla, wrote in a blog post last December.

If the new Firefox builds will not be buggy (something that the bi-annual major Windows 10 updates suffer from), we will be good.

Source: PCGamer

Please support our page theGeek.games on Patreon, so we can continue to write you the latest gaming, movie and tech news and reviews as an independent magazine.
Become a Patron!