Mozilla released Firefox3.5.3 on Wednesday 09-sep-2009, at 16:11PST. From “Dev says go” to “release is now available to public” was approx 16 days (16d 18h 35m) wall-clock time, of which Release Engineering took ~1.5 days (1d 13h 11m).

21:37 23aug: Dev says “go” for FF3.5.3
08:45 24aug: FF3.5.3 builds started
11:50 24aug: FF3.5.3 linux, mac builds handed to QA
13:38 24aug: FF3.5.3 signed-win32 builds handed to QA
05:41 25aug: FF3.5.3 update snippets available on test update channel
13:14 01sep: Dev & QA says “go” for Beta
13:23 01sep: FF3.5.3 update snippets available on live Beta channel
01:53 09sep: Dev & QA says “go” for Release; Build already completed final signing, bouncer entries
05:34 09sep: mirror replication started
06:42 09sep: mirror absorption good enough for testing
14:49 09sep: website changes finalized and visible. Build given “go” to make updates snippets live.
14:58 09sep: update snippets available on live update channel
16:11 09sep: release announced

Notes:

1) A significant amount of RelEng time was spent idle after the “go” was issued, just waiting. Specifically if “Dev says go” late night PDT, then nothing happens until the RelEng person wakes up in his timezone. If we exclude these long waiting times, the time for Build&Release drops to under a day (0d 22h 45m). I believe that is our fastest yet.
2) Our blow-by-blow scribbles are public, so the curious can read about it, warts and all, here. Those Build Notes also link to our tracking bug#511469.
3) The FF3.5.3 release was done at the same time as the FF3.0.14 release, without causing any delays to either release, and both still being super-fast release(s). Nice to see! 🙂

take care
John.