We’re going to extend the 11/19/2012 – 12/31/2012 cycle by a week, with a revised end of 1/6/2013. Given the timeline change, we’re targeting release of Firefox 18 for the middle of that week.
The last couple of weeks in the year are a great opportunity to spend time with family, enjoy the holidays, and prepare for the new year. Mozillians are no different – from past experience we know that our offices and IRC channels clear out. Our developer, QA, and contributor engagement of course also drops significantly. In 2011, there were about 150 bugs landed per week during the holidays as opposed an average of about 350 bugs per week the rest of the year.
While the Fox takes a quick breather from fighting for the open web, we’ll still maintain a response team during the break to address any new issues that arise. Nobody’s completely off the hook – make sure to put down the egg nog for a couple of minutes to update your family and friends to the latest version of Firefox, so that they can enjoy silent updates for years to come!
The details:
- Firefox 18 beta 1 will be released on Monday, Nov 26th
- Firefox 18, 19 and 20 will spend an extra week in development before release
- We’ll support Firefox 17 for an additional week as well (7 weeks), and Firefox 18 will be released the week of 1/6/2012
- The following cycle, we’ll return to our normal 6 week cadence for all releases riding the trains
- Please see the release calendar for the full set of future merge and release dates