⚡ Warning: This page hasn't been updated recently and may not be fully accurate or complete. In case of doubt, contact our release managers.

Here's the flow we currently use for communication about releases on several channels with PR/Marketing.

Release Channel

By Thursday prior to a GA Release Day (General Audience), the release manager for a particular version should send out the staged release notes for review.

When the updates are signed off by QA and the release notes and download links are up to date, we will email press@mozilla.com (and communications@mozilla.com, "comms") to call the release "live". Sometimes there is a delay out of our control. We do our best to hit this time by triggering the necessary steps well in advance of the targeted time.

The target for GA Release timing is 8am PT on the Tuesday of release day unless an explicit decision to move from that has been made to the release-driver list.

Beta & Aurora Channels

Friday prior to a GA Release Day we hold a Feature Review meeting to gather what will go in the notes for the upcoming Aurora release as well as what should be changed/added to Beta notes for the release moving up from Aurora. If you are interested in attending this meeting, please get in touch and we will add you to the list of invitees. This also is when we may put out an ask for blog links from the PR/Marketing team.

A draft of the release notes for Beta and Aurora, on a staging server, will be sent out for previewing at the earliest convenience of the release manager on point for that release. This has the goal of getting eyes on them at least the day before publishing them.

Timing for Beta and Aurora release is "as soon as we get QA sign off" and also granted that there is nothing else outstanding. As with GA, we wait until the updates are signed off by QA, release notes and download links are updated before we send the OK to press@mozilla.com announcing the release. We cannot (nor do I think we should) time this to a specific time because Beta/Aurora and ESR (as well as dealing with anything that might be falling out from the GA release) mean we need to be flexible and go with the flow of QA's ability to output information to us on those releases.

Questions?

As always, we are on IRC (lizzard, ritu, sylvestre, and when needed lmandel) for additional requests