Chrome has officially moved to a two-week release cycle, following through on the commitment Google made earlier this year. The transition took effect with Tuesday’s rollout of Chrome 153 across desktop, iOS, and Android platforms.

The accelerated release schedule is closely linked to Chrome’s evolving security approach in the age of AI, according to the company. With automated AI tools and input from community bug reporters driving up the sheer volume of patches and updates, Google notes that a shorter cycle streamlines the management of security fixes. This matters even more because rapidly evolving threats—some of which are also fueled by AI—can be countered more effectively when the time between landing a fix in the public codebase and delivering it to users is minimized.

By tightening the release timeline, Chrome aims to keep the “N-day” patch gap—the window between when a vulnerability becomes known and when it’s actually fixed—as narrow as possible. There’s an additional upside to faster releases: they let Chrome introduce new features more quickly. That’s particularly vital in the current AI landscape, where AI-assisted software development has spawned a wave of fresh browser contenders. Although OpenAI’s web browser, ChatGPT Atlas, has been discontinued, plenty of other alternatives are still vying for a slice of Chrome’s market share, including Brave, Dia, Opera Neon, Perplexity’s Comet, DuckDuckGo’s browser, and others.

Google is also experimenting with weaving more AI capabilities into Chrome and iterating rapidly on those additions, which further necessitates speedier updates. The shift to a two-week cadence has benefits that extend beyond Chrome itself. Given Chrome’s status as the world’s most widely used browser, this change can help establish a benchmark for the entire industry. Mozilla, Microsoft, and Brave have already started aligning with a faster two-week schedule, taking cues from Chrome’s lead.

This isn’t the first time Chrome has tweaked its release rhythm to improve patch handling. Back in 2021, the company moved from a six-week to a four-week cycle, building on the “release early, release often” philosophy it had embraced more than a decade earlier.