Mozilla has unveiled a plan that speeds up Firefox release cycles to no more than 16-weeks. While the plan is still in the early stages, the proposed 16-week development cycle will see improvements in several channels (or tiers) leading up to release. The four channels consist of nightly-builds of code in Mozilla-central, an experimental channel, a beta channel, and a stable release; a total of 100,000 test users are envisaged for the nightly builds, and up to a million and 10 million testers for the next two channels prior to stable release.

Following Chrome's lead, the use of silent background updates is also being halted to alleviate the disruption that such frequent updates will invariably cause. As pointed out by Ars Technica, Mozilla is already transitioning to silent updates for minor fixes in Firefox 4, though it remains to be seen if the Mozilla team has enough confidence in the process to start the capability for major releases. 

Another potential kink is related to the heightened chances of new updates causing extensions to stop working. On this front, Mozilla's plan is that users can opt to skip a particular update if they decide not to upgrade. Those interested can access the document for the draft Firefox Development Process here.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Ars Technica
- check out this article at Webmonkey

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