The New Rapid Release Strategy Adopted by Mozilla

Well if you haven’t realized by now Mozilla has been releasing updates for its products like crazy. This applies to both the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird mail client. This is due to its new rapid release strategy, following in the footsteps of Google’s chrome browser. While the changes might not be as apparent in the past when a new version was release, now fixes and patches and new features are rolled out as they are compiled.

Basically how it works is Mozilla has 4 channels that it keeps the different versions of Firefox called Nightly, Aurora, Beta, and Release, and the versions increase in stability respectively every six weeks. So whereas before it would take about six to nine months for a browser update it now only takes 6weeks!!! At the time of this writing Mozilla’s Firefox 6 has been released, Firefox 7 beta 2 is open for download, and Firefox 8 is available on their nightly builds server.

The browser’s conversion to a rapid release has been dreaded by corporations and developers alike not being able to keep up with the frequency of new releases. In their defense it makes it hard to develop to match the new browser and not leave users behind in terms of their experience and usability. Even Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team started poking fun at Mozilla new strategy sending a congratulatory cupcake for the release of Firefox 6 instead of a full-sized cake that is usually used. The size of the cake used to signify the impact of each update in Microsoft’s opinion.

Is this truly a step in the right direction for Mozilla? What do your thoughts on the subject?

Written By: Le-Andris O. Daniel