New Firefox OS to be released every three months
Mozilla is planning to add a touch of speed to the release schedule of its mobile OS.
From here on in, Firefox OS will get a feature release every three months, Mozilla said on Monday.
The previous two operating system to be released will be updated a six-weekly cycle, Alex Keybl, manager of release management at Mozilla, wrote in a blogpost on Friday.
"As far as I know, that's the most aggressive mobile OS release strategy out there (and may still require some tweaking)," he said.
The Firefox OS release cycle will be slightly longer than that of its Firefox browser products, however — which operate on a six-weekly release cycle Mozilla calls a "heartbeat" — despite the same Gecko engine underpinning them all as well.
Mozilla puts the slightly longer release schedule for Firefox OS down to the many other companies involved in the mobile supply chain.
"Unlike our desktop/mobile releases, we've had to go even further than delighting our users," Keybl said. "We've also had to juggle the timelines and requirements of all of the OEMs, carriers, and chipset manufacturers that we've partnered with. These new variables lead us to standardize on Gecko 18 for our first two major releases of Firefox OS. It made us 'skip a beat', but for all the right reasons.
"Now that we have our v1.0 behind us and we're moving forward with even more partners, we're going to do our best to bring Firefox OS back into our heartbeat".
The first commercial Firefox OS phones were launched earlier this month in Poland and Spain.