Like Google Chrome, Chrome OS Will Transition to a Four-Week Update Release Cycle

Google is speeding up the update release schedule for Chrome OS to a four-week cycle in the third quarter of this year, the company announced Friday.

“To deliver new features more rapidly to consumers while also continuing to prioritize the key pillars of Chrome OS—security, stability, speed and simplicity—Chrome OS will move to a 4-week stable channel starting with M96 in Q4,” Chrome OS release TPM lead Marina Kazatcker said in a blog post.

This will put the release schedule for Chrome OS on par with the one for its Chrome browser, which Google announced in March would also be switching to a four-week release schedule later this year. In order to sync the two schedules, Google said on Friday it’s skipping the M95 release for Chrome OS.

For enterprise and education users who may not want or be able to keep up with an update cycle that fast, Google plans to introduce a new channel with a more manageable 6-month cycle by the time the M96 release is ready, according to the blog post. The company said it will announce more details on that front soon.

“As we head into our next decade, these changes enable us to evolve Chrome OS to keep helping people get things done and to provide more helpful and secure experiences,” Kazatcker wrote.

The move reflects Google’s transition in recent years from rolling out sweeping overhauls to releasing small, iterative updates for its products more frequently, a transition it’s said is geared toward delivering new features more quickly and maintaining a more seamless online experience.

Not long after Google’s announcement in March, Microsoft followed suit by accelerating the update release schedule for its Edge browser, which was recently rebuilt in Google’s open-source browser project Chromium. Starting in the third quarter of this year, Microsoft said it will begin issuing updates every four weeks instead of six weeks.