Mozilla has updated its  new rapid release cycle and is now planning to release Firefox 5 on June 21 instead of June 29. Mozilla is also adopting a versioning system that is very similar to the system that is used by Google for Chrome.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, if it is working perfectly – Mozilla’s new browser release schedule takes more cues from Google. It indicates that future Firefox releases will be moving in 18 week cycles from the first mozilla-central (nightly) release to a stable final release. A new browser version will be spending 6 weeks in mozilla-central and will be updated nightly. It will stay 6 weeks in the experimental phase and updated nightly as well. In both phases, Mozilla is likely to keep the “Minefield” branding for Firefox.

After 12 weeks, Firefox will actually be called “Firefox” and move to beta and receive weekly updates.  The beta phase is also scheduled to last 6 weeks. The total is 18 weeks, if our math is correct, even if Mozilla says we should expect new Firefox releases every 6 – 12 weeks, which we can’t quite follow. Due to the delays of Firefox 4, Mozilla will be releasing Firefox faster than future releases – mozilla-central will only be 3 weeks, and experimental and beta only 5 weeks each. That puts Firefox 5 beta at a May 17 release date and the final at a June 21 date.

Firefox 5 will be moved out of Mozilla-central on April 12/13, which means that development of Firefox 6 will begin on the same date. It’s a pretty straight-forward 6 week cycle for each phase. Mozilla is so confident that it can maintain this cycle that it has even published a simple program that calculates future release dates.

The new release schedule will also impact Firefox version numbers. Firefox 5 will be named Firefox 5.0.0.1 when the development starts. Google will first be increase the numbers to the very right for the central phase and then move a step left for each next phase. A version number for the final release could be, for example, 5.6.42.144, which would mean that there were 144 central releases, 42 experimental versions and 6 beta releases. In that way, Firefox isn’t that different from Chrome (Google also uses build numbers for Chromium, which is released at least 5 times daily.)

Of course, the accelerated release plan raises questions whether Mozilla can put all those fancy new features into Firefox 5.

 

Update: It appears that the release plan is very much still a work in progress. Shortly after we published this article, Mozilla updated the document and renamed the experimental channel to “aurora” and scrapped the version number system. The version numbers will apparently be 6.0a1 (aurora), 6.0a2 (beta) and 6.0 (final).

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