Chrome will get an update every four weeks instead of six weeks later this year

Google developers will provide Chrome with a milestone update every four weeks from the third quarter of 2021. Until now, the company’s browser has been updated every six weeks.

Alex Mineer, Google Chrome’s Technical Program Manager, reports that his team has been able to shorten the update cycle as developers have improved the update testing and release process. This is partly related to narrowing the patch gap at the end of 2019 and early 2020: that is the period between fixing security vulnerabilities in the open source code and those in the stable Chrome release. With Chrome 76, that period was still 33 days, but with Chrome 78, it was reduced to 15 days.

From the release of Chrome 94 in the third quarter of 2021, Google therefore wants to move towards a release schedule for milestone versions of four weeks. This ends the six-week update cycle that Google has used for more than ten years. In addition, there will be an Extended Stable option for IT administrators who want more time to implement the updates. They will then receive an update with new functions every eight weeks. Security updates for major issues will continue to be released every two weeks for the Extended Stable versions as well.