Firefox 2.0.0.8 update to be updated
We take security seriously at Mozilla, which is why we regularly divert development, build, and quality assurance resources to focus on our security and stability (aka: “dot-dot”) releases. If there’s a critical issue — like the existence of a known exploit in the wild — we push out an update as fast as possible.
We also publish regular maintenance releases every 6 to 8 weeks, which contain updates for greater stability and security. Great care is taken with these “dot-dot” releases to limit risk of breaking functionality, and each release is given a healthy dose of quality assurance testing as well as a period of beta testing with about 50,000 to 70,000 users in our community before being shipped to all Firefox users.
The 2.0.0.8 release fixed some 200 issues, but accidentally regressed a few things. Most users won’t see any difference or experience any problems, and those 200 fixes make the 2.0.0.8 update very valuable, but you should never have to choose functionality over security. So we’re working fast to understand and fix these problems, and will shortly be issuing a 2.0.0.9 update to address them. The specific problems are:
- Bug 400406 - Firefox will ignore the “clear” CSS property when used beneath a box that is using the “float” property. There is a temporary workaround JS/CSS code available for web developers with affected layouts.
- Bug 400467 - Windows Vista users will get “Java not found” or “Java not working” errors when trying to load Java applets after updating. To fix this, users can right-click the Firefox icon and “Run as administrator”, then browse to a page with a Java applet — doing this once will fix the problem and permanently restore Java functionality.
- Bug 396695 - Add-ons are disabled after updating. Users can fix this problem by opening their profile folder and removing three files (extensions.rdf, extensions.ini and extensions.cache)
- Bug 400421 - Removing a single area element from an image map will cause the entire map to disappear. There is no workaround available at this time.
- Bug 400735 - Some Windows users may experience crashes at startup. There is no workaround available at this time.
As always, we could use your help testing these issues and their fixes to ensure that we get a 2.0.0.9 release issued as fast as possible (hopefully next week) for all of our users.