Amid new competition, Chrome is accelerating its release schedule

As AI-powered browsers from companies like OpenAI, Perplexity and others try to carve out a space for themselves in a market long dominated by Chrome, Google says it’s now accelerating the pace of Chrome releases. Starting next September, Chrome will move from a four-week release schedule to a two-week schedule, the tech giant announced on Tuesday.

Chrome has committed to delivering a new milestone of some kind with each release, in areas such as stability, speed, or ease of use. (This is in addition to the weekly security updates introduced in 2023.) As a result, these milestones will now come more frequently.

Officially, Google says the new schedule reflects the ever-changing web ecosystem, and it wants to ensure developers have immediate access to the latest tools and improvements. However, the move comes as Chrome finally faces what could one day become real competition from AI model providers, which are trying to rebuild the browser for a proxy web, where more tasks are automated on behalf of users.

ChatGPT Atlas, OpenAI’s web browser, offers its own built-in AI assistant and experiments with several automations. Meanwhile, Perplexity’s Comet includes an AI sidebar for everyone and other tools like an email assistant and meeting scheduler for its paid customers.

In response to emerging threats, Google quickly implemented deeper integrations of Gemini into Chrome, including its own set of proxy features for standalone tasks.

Google told TechCrunch that this latest move is not related to AI, but it’s hard to see how the need to compete at a faster pace doesn’t play a role.

The new release schedule begins with beta and stable (version 153) versions of Chrome on September 8, 2026, and will apply to all platforms, including desktop, Android, and iOS. No changes have been made to other early release platforms, such as the Dev and Canary channels.

The Extended Stable release, designed for enterprise administrators and Chromium integrators who need more time to manage updates, will continue on an eight-week cycle, as before. Google notes that this option will also remain available to Chromebook users.