Soft code freeze for Firefox 96 starts December 2nd

[Dianna Smith]

Hi,

With Firefox 95 in Release Candidate phase this week, we are nearing the end of the Nightly 96 cycle.

In order to avoid invalidating the testing we get out of late Nightly and to ensure that we can roll out Beta 96 to a wider audience with confidence this week, we'd like to ask that any risky changes be avoided from Thursday, December 2nd until after the version bump to 97 on December 6th.

Also, please be advised that string freeze for Firefox 96 begins Friday, December 3rd. In order to ensure that our localizers have adequate time to translate strings, please make sure that all string changes have landed by EOD Friday.

Some reminders for the soft code freeze period:

Do:
- Be ready to back out patches that cause crash spikes, new crashes, severe regressions
- Monitor new regressions and escalate merge blockers
- Support release management by prioritizing fixing of merge blockers

Do Not:
- Land a risky patch or a large patch
- Land new features (that affect the current Nightly version) — be mindful that code behind NIGHTLY_BUILD or RELEASE_OR_BETA ifdefs can lead to unexpected CI results
- Flip prefs that enable new Features that were untested in the Nightly cycle
- Plan to kick off new experiments that might impact a feature's merge readiness

Please let us know if you have any questions/concerns.

Thanks,

Dianna Smith