We’ve known for months that Mozilla was planning on moving to a more aggressive release cycle. Now Mozilla has posted a draft of how that release cycle might look.
Instead of having the nightly builds, then alpha, beta and release milestones – Mozilla is looking to have :
- Nightly – with up to 100,000 users
- Aurora – up to 1 million users, updated nightly, but not clear the difference vs current nightly
- Beta – -up to 10 million users
- Release – over 100 million users
So, no not much is really changing in terms of ‘channels’ except for the Aurora-wildcard, which is kinda/sorta/maybe a nightly replacement.
What is changing is how the development process will feed the channels.
The plan is that changes are first staged in the Mozilla-central repository for 6 weeks, I see this as the ‘merge window’ that as a Linux user, I’m very familiar with. This step is followed by 6 weeks in Mozilla aurora, followed by 6 weeks in beta and then it’s off to release.
So the whole process is 18 weeks in total – or from a user facing view, 12 weeks from the time an aurora user sees a release until it becomes a final release.
Personally, I don’t think that’s enough time to bake major changes.