Web Browser & Extension Release Tracking
Four-week release trains, out-of-band zero-day fixes and the extension platform changes that quietly break tooling.
Browsers ship faster than almost any other class of consumer software. The major engines run on a roughly four-week train, which means a stable release, a beta and a developer channel are all in flight simultaneously at any given moment. For a web developer this cadence is the main input into what you can ship; for everyone else it is mostly invisible until a version bump changes a default.
Two kinds of browser release deserve separate attention. The scheduled train release is routine. The out-of-band patch — shipped days after a stable release, usually referencing a vulnerability already being exploited — is not, and it is the one worth an alert. We flag those separately rather than letting them blend into the regular cadence.
What this category tracks
- Stable channel releases
- Scheduled versions across the major desktop and mobile browsers, with the notable platform changes in each.
- Emergency security releases
- Out-of-band patches, typically addressing actively exploited flaws, marked as critical priority.
- Extension platform changes
- Manifest revisions, API deprecations and store policy deadlines that force extension authors to migrate.
- Web platform features
- Standards reaching stable availability, and the deprecations scheduled to remove older behaviour.
What matters most here
Browser deprecations arrive with long notice periods and then land all at once. An API marked for removal is usually announced several releases before it is actually gone, and the announcement is the event worth capturing — by the time the removal ships, the migration window has closed. Treating a deprecation notice as a deadline rather than a news item is the useful reframing.
Where this data comes from
- Official browser release blogs and stable-channel update feeds
- Vendor security advisory pages
- Extension store developer changelogs and policy notices
- Public platform status and deprecation trackers
Every indexed entry links to its primary source. See our editorial and sourcing policy for what we verify and what we do not.
Common questions
Why does the same browser appear several times in a week?
A single week can contain a stable release, a patch to that stable release and a separate mobile build with a different version number. Each is a distinct event with its own contents, so each gets its own entry rather than being merged into a summary.
Do you track beta and developer channels?
Where the vendor publishes them on a documented feed, yes, but they are tagged so they can be filtered out. Most people want stable only; developers testing against upcoming changes want the opposite.
Tracked releases in Web Browsers
The live release list for this category loads below.