Speeding up Chrome‘s release cycle

Thursday, March 4, 2021

For more than a decade, Chrome has shipped a new milestone every 6 weeks, delivering security, stability, speed and simplicity to our users and the web. 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. Because of this, we are excited to announce that Chrome is planning to move to releasing a new milestone every 4 weeks, starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021.

Additionally, we 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.

For users on Chrome OS, we also plan 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.

We have updated the documentation for our new release schedule, and we welcome feedback from Chromium contributors at branches@chromium.org. We’ve also published a preliminary update to our release calendar that we’ll keep up to date as we get closer to launching our new release schedule.

We’re excited to continue evolving Chrome, and providing the best in security, stability, speed and simplicity to our users, even more rapidly in the future!

Alex Mineer, Technical Program Manager, Chrome Operations