Mozilla Will Release Firefox 50 By Year's End, According to this Schedule
Mozilla is ditching the Train Model, the fixed-schedule rapid release cycle that it adopted four years ago, in favor of a variably scheduled release cycle. With the old release cycle, Mozilla rolled out a new version of Firefox every six weeks. With the new release cycle, Mozilla will release a new Firefox version every six-to-eight weeks.
We’ll see several Firefox releases this year, all the way up to Firefox 50, which will be arriving by the year’s end. Check out the release schedule below to see precisely when.
Firefox Release Schedule for 2016
Firefox ESR Release Schedule for 2016
Firefox 45 ESR (Extended Support Release) will be released on the same date as Firefox 45, on March 8, 2016.
If you’re not familiar with the ESR version of Firefox, let me quickly put things in perspective. Meant for enterprises, public institutions, and other organizations, it’s a Firefox version that does not modify the web or add-ons platform – it only gets security updates.
“Mozilla is committed to providing the best Web experience for people everywhere, and our goal for the Firefox ESR is to make it simpler for companies, public institutions, organizations, and institutions that manage their desktops to deploy Firefox in those environments,” said Jay Sullivan, who was Vice President of Products at Mozilla back in 2012 when the ESR version of Firefox was first introduced.
Firefox 51 will arrive early 2017
Firefox 51 will be the first Stable release of 2017. We don’t know what exciting new features it will have to offer, it’s too soon for that. What we do know is that it will be rolled out 6 weeks after the prior release, on January 24, 2017.
Firefox 44 was the first Stable release of 2016. Rolled out to the public on January 26, it came with several new features, as highlighted by the release notes:
Say bye-bye to Firefox OS, Firefox Marketplace
With Firefox OS, Mozilla hoped to provide an alternative to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems. Sadly though, it wasn’t as popular as Mozilla had hopped. This week, Mozilla announced that it will stop developing Firefox OS – at least for smartphones. And speaking about smartphones, I have to remind you that Mozilla had previously announced that it would stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through operator channels.
Firefox OS smartphones will be discontinued by May 2016 and Firefox OS for smartphones will reach end-of-life once version 2.6 is released. The OS stack will live on to power Smart TVs and potentially other devices in the future.
The death of Firefox OS marks the death of Firefox Marketplace as well. Said Marketplace worked similarly to Apple’s App Store and Google Play, allowing users to get apps designed for any device that runs Firefox – that’s for Firefox OS for smartphones, Firefox for desktops, and Firefox for Android. Unfortunately, Firefox Marketplace will shut down across all platforms.
Mozilla forays into IoT
Mozilla won’t put any more resources into its Firefox OS platform for smartphones. It will shift focus from smartphone operating systems and onto the Internet of Things (IoT).
“All the hard work and resulting code are a good contribution to our future work on Connected Devices and to the Web as a platform. With them both, we added more than 30 WebAPIs and proved the Web is flexible enough to support products from smartphones to TVs — it also stands as a great starting point to proceed to the next phase of Connected Devices,” explained Mozilla Senior Vice President of Connected Devices, Arj Jaaksi.
We’ll see several Firefox releases this year, all the way up to Firefox 50, which will be arriving by the year’s end. Check out the release schedule below to see precisely when.
Firefox Release Schedule for 2016
- Firefox 45 – March 8, 2016
- Firefox 46 – April 19, 2016.
- Firefox 47 – June 7, 2016.
- Firefox 48 – August 2, 2016.
- Firefox 49 – September 13, 2016.
- Firefox 50 – November 8, 2016.
- Firefox 50.0.1 – December 13, 2016 (release for critical fixes as needed).
Firefox ESR Release Schedule for 2016
Firefox 45 ESR (Extended Support Release) will be released on the same date as Firefox 45, on March 8, 2016.
If you’re not familiar with the ESR version of Firefox, let me quickly put things in perspective. Meant for enterprises, public institutions, and other organizations, it’s a Firefox version that does not modify the web or add-ons platform – it only gets security updates.
“Mozilla is committed to providing the best Web experience for people everywhere, and our goal for the Firefox ESR is to make it simpler for companies, public institutions, organizations, and institutions that manage their desktops to deploy Firefox in those environments,” said Jay Sullivan, who was Vice President of Products at Mozilla back in 2012 when the ESR version of Firefox was first introduced.
Firefox 51 will arrive early 2017
Firefox 51 will be the first Stable release of 2017. We don’t know what exciting new features it will have to offer, it’s too soon for that. What we do know is that it will be rolled out 6 weeks after the prior release, on January 24, 2017.
Firefox 44 was the first Stable release of 2016. Rolled out to the public on January 26, it came with several new features, as highlighted by the release notes:
- Improved warning pages for certificate errors and untrusted connections
- Enable H.264 if system decoder is available
- Enable WebM/VP9 video support on systems that don't support MP4/H.264
- In the animation-inspector timeline, lightning bolt icon next to animations running on the compositor thread
- Support the brotli compression format via HTTPS content-encoding
- Screenshot commands allow user choice of pixel ratio in Developer Tools
- Firefox Can Now Get Push Notifications From Your Favorite Sites.
Say bye-bye to Firefox OS, Firefox Marketplace
With Firefox OS, Mozilla hoped to provide an alternative to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems. Sadly though, it wasn’t as popular as Mozilla had hopped. This week, Mozilla announced that it will stop developing Firefox OS – at least for smartphones. And speaking about smartphones, I have to remind you that Mozilla had previously announced that it would stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through operator channels.
Firefox OS smartphones will be discontinued by May 2016 and Firefox OS for smartphones will reach end-of-life once version 2.6 is released. The OS stack will live on to power Smart TVs and potentially other devices in the future.
The death of Firefox OS marks the death of Firefox Marketplace as well. Said Marketplace worked similarly to Apple’s App Store and Google Play, allowing users to get apps designed for any device that runs Firefox – that’s for Firefox OS for smartphones, Firefox for desktops, and Firefox for Android. Unfortunately, Firefox Marketplace will shut down across all platforms.
Mozilla forays into IoT
Mozilla won’t put any more resources into its Firefox OS platform for smartphones. It will shift focus from smartphone operating systems and onto the Internet of Things (IoT).
“All the hard work and resulting code are a good contribution to our future work on Connected Devices and to the Web as a platform. With them both, we added more than 30 WebAPIs and proved the Web is flexible enough to support products from smartphones to TVs — it also stands as a great starting point to proceed to the next phase of Connected Devices,” explained Mozilla Senior Vice President of Connected Devices, Arj Jaaksi.
