In general, Google Chrome receives its new milestone related to stability, security, or speed every six weeks. However, moving forward, the company has announced that it will be moving to a faster release cycle by shipping a new milestone every four weeks, starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021.
“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,” acknowledges the Chrome team in their official blog.
While this four-week release cycle enables the user to experience a constantly evolving browsing experience, not everyone wants to move quickly. Acknowledging that, Google will add a new Extended Stable option, with milestone updates every 8 weeks. This 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, claims the company.
“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,” says Chrome team.