Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly

Summary

SOFTWARE Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly And what to expect in Firefox 153 as the next ESR release gets close Firefox releases will soon get even closer together – but not ESR ones, which remain annual, with the next one due out soon. The change was announced last week on the dev-platform@mozilla.org mailing list by Mozilla’s director of engineering Sylvestre Ledru:“We are planning to move Firefox Desktop and Android from a 4-week release cadence to a 2-week release cadence starting in September 2026.“This will be an experiment… This does not mean that all work needs to ship twice as fast. Work that is not ready should not be rushed, and features can still take the time they need to bake. “The current target is to release Firefox 155 on September 1, 2026, instead of September 15 … “We will closely monitor how this change works in practice and adjust if needed.”The change is already visible in the upcoming Firefox Release Calendar. At the time of writing, it shows the current four-week cadence for Firefox 153 and 154, with Firefox 155 brought forward to September 1. From then on, it lists releases at roughly two-week intervals.This isn’t unprecedented. The last time Mozilla did it was over a decade ago. Google announced a very similar change for Chrome back in March, and The Register reported on it going to six-weekly releases in 2010 and then four-weekly ones in 2021.Brace for the impact of the next ESRIn the meantime, Firefox 153 is nearly here: at the time of writing, it’s scheduled for Tuesday, July 21. Right now, the release notes are blank, but the beta release notes are more forthcoming.You can look forward to further improvements to PDF editing. Version 153 will be able to merge multiple PDF documents into one by a simple drag-and-drop in the PDF sidebar, and insert images into PDFs as new pages. It will also improve highlighting text in PDFs.The new version can generate QR codes for sharing web pages offline, such as in printed documents....