In an attempt to beat its competitors including Microsoft’s Windows Phone, Apple’s iOS, Ubuntu Phone and Android, Mozilla has announced that it will release security updates for its Firefox OS every six weeks. That’s not all. The software will get new features on a quarterly basis.
The updates coming your way every six weeks will include security improvements and bug fixes. This is no surprise as Mozilla continues to follow the same trend it created with Firefox web browser. There’s a new version of the browser released every six weeks.
But one wonders how smartphone OEMs and wireless carriers will deal with these frequent updates particularly at the time when they face issues in shipping the latest version of Android OS. It is worth mentioning here that a majority of the Android smartphones come shipped with older versions of the OS, rather than the latest one, and also have to wait for a long time to get upgrades.
Microsoft, on the other hand, pushes the updates Windows operating system every few years. However, the company does provide security updates about once a month. For Mozilla to really adopt the approach of pushing security updates every six weeks, it has to do that directly to the users’ devices, without getting slowed down by mobile operators or device makers.
As of now, the Geeksphone Keon and Peak developer edition phones are already getting Firefox 1.1 update, which comes with speed improvements, fixes bugs, and a lot more. It is worth mentioning here that the first lot of Firefox OS shipped recently. The platform has received initial acceptance. It has to be seen whether it can really compete with the existing front runners of the race.
