Mozilla unveils ‘aggressive’ Firefox OS schedule: Quarterly feature releases, security updates every six weeks

With Firefox OS version 1.0 out the door, Mozilla has decided that it’s time to unveil its strategy for new versions. The company is planning to make feature releases available to partners every quarter and push out security updates for the previous two feature releases every six weeks.

“As far as I know, that’s the most aggressive mobile OS release strategy out there,” Alex Keybl, Mozilla’s Manager of Release Management, said in a statement. “This sort of alignment across multiple browser products, and now an OS, is unprecedented at the pace we’re moving.”

That being said, nothing is set in stone. Keybl admits his plan “may still require some tweaking.”

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Mozilla wants to bring the rapid release process it uses for Firefox to Firefox OS. So far, the company has managed to push out new versions of both Firefox for desktop and Firefox for Android every 1.5 months with few hiccups.

While that frequency is unreasonable for an operating system, at least for now, the company believes security updates can be tested and sent out in that timeframe. It’s definitely feasible: after all, Microsoft has a monthly release cycle for Windows security updates.

Yet the three-month feature release cycle is the real game-changer. While mobile operating systems are certainly refreshed more often than their desktop counterparts (although one could argue Microsoft is trying to adapt with Windows 8.1), the rate is no faster than about a year. Cutting that number into four will be no easy feat.

Despite this promise, Mozilla was smart not to give a specific date, so it can adjust its schedule as things go. It’s thus not clear when exactly we can expect Firefox OS 2.0. If we choose to use July 9th, the day the first Firefox OS devices hit stores, as the base, then we’ll likely see a security update in August, another one in September, and the first version bump in October.

See also – Hands-on with Firefox OS: ZTE Open and Alcatel One Touch Fire and Mozilla courts app developers to Firefox OS with free Geeksphone Keon handset ahead of launch

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