There will now be a new version of Google Chrome every two weeks following the announcement of a dramatic acceleration of the browser’s development cycle. The new schedule means that milestone releases will now be shipped every two weeks rather than every four weeks.
Google says that the aim is to help improve security and stability by reducing what it refers to as the “patch gap”. The changes are not due to kick in until later in the year, but it means there will be much more frequent updates to install.
Making the announcement, Google says that “starting September 2026, Chrome will move to a two-week release cycle, from the current four-week cycle”. This is a change from the schedule that has been in place since 2021, but Google notes its 2023 decision to start “a weekly security update to further improve our patch gap and introduced an early stable release to improve release quality”.
Google’s Ben Mason and Deepak Ravichandran go on to say:
The web platform is constantly advancing, and our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities. Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, Chrome is moving to a two-week release cycle. While releases will be more frequent, their smaller scope minimizes disruption and simplifies post-release debugging. And thanks to recent process enhancements, we are confident this shift will maintain our high standards for stability.
The new release cycle means that a new beta and stable version of Chrome will ship every two weeks, starting from the stable release of Chrome 153 on September 8th. This applies to all platforms—Desktop, Android, and iOS. There will be no changes to the Dev and the Canary channels.
In light of the change, the release schedule for Chrome now looks like this:
| Stage | M153 (Old) | M153 (New) | M154 (Old) | M154 (New) |
| Branch | Mon, Aug 24 | Mon, Aug 17 | Mon, Sep 21 | Mon, Aug 31 |
| Beta Promotion | Wed, Aug 26 | Wed, Aug 19 | Wed, Sep 23 | Wed, Sep 2 |
| Stable Cut | Tue, Sep 8 | Tue, Aug 25 | Tue, Oct 6 | Tue, Sep 8 |
| Early Stable Release | Wed, Sep 9 | Wed, Aug 26 | Wed, Oct 7 | Wed, Sep 9 |
| Stable Release | Tue, Sep 22 | Tue, Sep 8 | Tue, Oct 20 | Tue, Sep 22 |
Google points out that there is no change to the Extended Stable release schedule, which will remain on the eight-week release cycle that has been in place since 2021.
The company concludes by saying:
Keep track of upcoming release dates and included features on the Chrome Status Roadmap and on the Chromium Dashboard. We publish Chrome release notes on this site. Posts detailing features included in the beta can be found on the blog as each beta is released. A Chrome Beta for each version will ship three weeks before the stable release. We recommend developers test with the beta to keep up to date with any upcoming changes that might impact your sites and applications.
Image credit: Juan Roballo / Dreamstime.com
