Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge began their every-four-weeks release cadence with the launch last week of version 94 of each browser.
Google released Chrome 94 on Sept. 21, while Microsoft issued Edge 94 three days later, on Sept. 24.
From those dates, Chrome and Edge will upgrade every four weeks. Chrome 95 and Edge 95, for example, will debut Oct. 19 and Oct. 21, respectively. There will be exceptions to that pace for holidays, however. For instance, Chrome 96, the final version of 2021, will release Nov. 16, and be followed by Chrome 97 on Jan. 4, 2022, a seven-week interval.
Google announced the then-upcoming change to a more frequent release schedule in early March; Microsoft quickly followed with news of its own several days later.
(Microsoft cannot divorce Edge’s release schedule from Chrome’s because both are powered by Chromium, the open-source project dominated by Google engineers.)
The new release tempo for Chrome and Edge mimics that of Mozilla’s Firefox, which switched to the same four-week schedule in September 2019.
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