New Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta Fixes 83 Bugs Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 Makes Its Debut with Plenty of Fixes Sean Michael Kerner
From the 'Coming Soon, Very Soon' files:
The third beta of Mozilla's open source Firefox 3.6 browser has added fixes for 83 bugs as well as several new features.
Of the 83 bugs fixed, 13 have been tagged as being critical. It looks to me like the majority of those critical flaws are crash-related items.
One particularly interesting critical bug fix is one for the crash reporter itself. According to Mozilla, "the updater crashes when trying to update with crash reporter open."
One of the key goals overall for the Firefox 3.6 release is to increase performance. To that end, there is at least one new feature in Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 that will help to support that goal. From a technical perspective, Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 now implements the async attribute of script elements. Basically, this is a way run scripts asynchronously to improve overall page load times.
Another new change is the component directory lock-down for add-ons.
"In addition to the standard mechanism for extending the browser via add-ons and plugins, though, there has historically been another way to do it," Mozilla developer Johnathan Nightingale wrote. "Third-party applications installed on your machine would sometimes try to extend Firefox by just adding their own code directly to the "components" directory, where much of Firefox's own code is stored."
That's a problem for a number of potential stability and security reasons, but it's a problem that is being eliminated with Firefox 3.6 Beta 3.
Nightingale commented that components were not as visible as add-ons, making them more difficult to track, update and disable. So now, Mozilla is disabling them all.
"If you're a Firefox user, this should be 100 percent positive," Nightingale wore. "You don't have to change anything, your regular add-ons should continue to work properly — you just might notice fewer crashes or odd bugs. If you do notice that something has stopped working, particularly a third party addition to Firefox, you might want to contact the producer of that addition to ensure they know about the change."
I think this is clearly a good move, and frankly i'm amazed that such a loophole existed in the first place. I expect though that the change will have some impact, I've just started using Beta 3 myself and time will tell what (if anything) will break as a result of the component lockdown.
With these two new big items in Beta 3, I'd also expect there to be at least one more beta and then at least on release candidate prior to a final Firefox 3.6 release.
From the 'Coming Soon, Very Soon' files:
