Last month, Firefox's outgoing director Mike Beltzner posted a roadmap that broke with Mozilla's history of only shipping new versions after a year or so of development, and instead proposed three more new versions in 2011. The plan clearly took inspiration from Google's Chrome release schedule, which sees far more frequent updates—Chrome is already at version 10 after just two-and-a-half years of existence. With Chrome rapidly gaining market share, and Internet Explorer recently re-energized with version 9, Firefox is seeing stiffer competition lately, so a more frequently refreshed browser may help raise its prospects.
Now a draft document has been published by Mozilla outlining four simultaneous release tracks, in further Chrome schedule emulation. The document is authored by developer Rob Sayre, with acknowledgements to 38 Mozilla team members, including Beltzner and Johnathan Nightingale, Firefox's director of development.
The release tracks, or "channels," to use Google's term, range from the most experimental to the most stable. Firefox's channels are tentatively called Mozilla-central (aka "nightly"), experimental, beta, and Firefox. The intent of the new approach is to have regular updates with whatever improvements are available to the released browser, whether all new features are ready for inclusion or not.
"The goal of the process is to provide regular improvements to users without disrupting longer term work," Sayre said in the document. "The Firefox-experimental channel gets new features at regular intervals, but some of them might be disabled if it looks like they need more work. The beta channel receives only new features that are slated for the next Firefox release."
A staggered release track allots six weeks to each of the four channels, with the code moving up to its more-stable neighbor in the last week. The whole process from the start of a Mozilla-central version to release of a public version of Firefox will take 16 weeks—a far cry from the current year-long timetable. Each channel gets its own separate code repository, with the moves occurring at the regularly scheduled intervals. This too represents a significant change from the way Mozilla has been doing things: It has typically waited until code was ready before releasing any beta or final versions, with exceptions only being made for security and stability updates.
Sayre's document foresees audiences for each release channel as differing by "powers of ten"—ranging from 100,000 testers for the Mozilla-central channel, through 1 million for experimental, 10 million for beta, and hundreds of millions for released versions. The numbers are inflated, though, when compared with the 20,000 people that Mozilla claimed ran nightly builds last year, as Ars Technica's Ryan Paul points out.
The document also addresses several more concerns that the new release strategy presents. With such frequent releases, the team won't be able to update every back release for security. Once again, the Chrome solution presents itself: have the browser update itself automatically and silently, suggests the document. Another issue is extension compatibility, which the document acknowledges will be a thorny issue, without proposing a solid solution.
Firefox 4.0 will be unaffected by the new release schedule plan. That major update to the independent Web browser has been promised for next Tuesday, March 22.