Earlier this week, Google developers hit the brakes on releasing new versions of Chrome and Chrome OS. Citing the fact that many are working remotely, the Chromium team continues to develop future releases of the browser and OS but are primarily focusing on making sure that the current version 80 is as stable and secure as it can be.
There hasn’t been an official statement on how long Chrome releases will be paused but it appears that developers will be skipping at least one milestone version. In an update to the Chromium Dev Group announcement that covered the initial pause of Chrome releases, Chrome’s Director of Technical Program Management shared the news that the development of M82 was being abandoned.
Here are some of the immediate actions based on the above decision:
We will abandon current M82 branches, remove infra support, and stop testing/merges to the branches
We will not push any new M82 releases to Dev, and we will stop stabilization for Beta
We will move Dev channel to M83 asap
We will keep Beta channel on M81 until M83 is ready to be promoted
Jason Kersey, Director, Technical Program Management
The update doesn’t specifically reference Chrome OS but the original post does refer back to the announcement that both the browser and the OS would be held back. In the end, the pause should have little bearing on the features and updates that arrive when the delay is over. It simply means that 83 will contain the majority of features we were expecting in 82 and this change will keep the Chrome and Chrome OS release calendar closer to its original schedule. Presumably, the Dev channel of Chrome and Chrome OS will be making the move to version 83 in the coming week.