Firefox 3.5.1 Released 147
alek writes "A day after Slashdot reports about a self-inflicted vulnerability in Firefox 3.5, Mozilla releases 3.5.1. It addresses that security issue, but also fixes the annoying slow-startup on Windows. Bummer the UNIX wars have subsided, because apparently they also had to fix a problem where Firefox on a Sparc platform would crash when visiting www.hp.com!"
I'd fix bugs and contribute quality code (Score:2, Informative)
slow start for _some_ (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Blue screen (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the linux blue screen of death is blinking of 2 (or is it three?) of the keyboard leds. Though support for blue screen of death is coming, by the name of kernel mode-settting. It is pretty rare, though.
Lockups I have seen, too, in both linux and windows. Lots of cases is hardware problems, but your problem sounds like a driver issue. Using proprietary drivers, perhaps?
Re:I'd fix bugs and contribute quality code (Score:5, Informative)
Here, let me click on the top link for "firefox build instructions" in google: simple firefox build [mozilla.org]. Looks pretty standard to me. Tests, if there are any, are usually automated or findable by a similar exercise.
Re:slow start for _some_ (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Someone tell Canonical. (Score:5, Informative)
I installed it ages ago:
aptitude install firefox-3.5
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=names&keywords=firefox-3.5 [ubuntu.com]
Re:Someone tell it to Canonical. (Score:4, Informative)
Just add the fta repository & install "firefox-3.5". They even link to a mozilla daily build repository if that's your thing.
Re:Blue screen (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, indeed I do. I wasn't trying to be bashing/trolling here, just pointing out the sub-optimal end-user experience. My ATI card (RV710 [Radeon HD 4350]) is by no means rare and I can't afford to buy another, more "compatible", one.
Re:Someone tell it to Canonical. (Score:2, Informative)
Scroll down to firefox-3.5. Stupidly, this package doesn't overwrite the firefox package, meaning that applications will still use 3.0 to open links. Even if you remove the firefox package, firefox-3.5 is still not used. Changing the webbrowser in preferred applications seems to work on some applications...
Anyway, in the end I just simlinked like so: ln -s /usr/bin/firefox-3.5 /usr/bin/firefox, and everything worked great.
Re:slow start for _some_ (Score:2, Informative)
It was user situation dependent. Firefox was reading all of a user's temp files to seed its RNG or something along those lines so if you had a lot of large temp files your startup time would be quite large.
Regardless, it still takes 5x Chrome's startup time with the fix so... peh.
Re:slow start for _some_ (Score:5, Informative)
On further study, it NSS DOES use process IDs and many, many other factors to generate the seeds. Searching the additional file locations ("C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\History", "C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files", "C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\My Recent Documents", "C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Temp\", "Recycle Bin", and "Network Neighborhood") were added because some older OSs (Win2k and WinCE) didn't have strong enough build-in pseudo-random number generators.
This patch changed NSS to use the built-in PRNG in Windows XP and up which uses "process ID and thread ID, the system clock, the system time, the system counter, memory status, free disk clusters, andthe hashed user environment block".
Re:slow start for _some_ (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Someone tell it to Canonical. (Score:3, Informative)
Ubuntu uses update-alternatives to select between different packages providing the same functionality
to see which browsers are installed:
/usr/bin/firefox-3.5
update-alternatives --list x-www-browser
to select firefox-3.5:
update-alternatives --set x-www-browser
Re:version numbers (Score:5, Informative)
Going by previous versions of firefox, shouldn't it be 3.5.0.1 rather than 3.5.1?
Mozilla decided to simplify that with Firefox 3 (note that the upcoming security release for Firefox 3 is 3.0.12, not 3.0.0.12). Exactly why they used four numbers in the first place is something I don't know, it seems it started with Firefox 1.5. I know that one advantage touted of XPCOM was the ability to easily make incremental updates, so maybe there was a plan for a Firefox 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 (with the final number for each being used for security updates). Of course that would've been complicated and silly, so it seems the plan was abandoned and the version number compacted.
In case you can't find it... (Score:2, Informative)
On the macintosh version at least, the 'check for updates' menu item is in the Help menu. Because that's clearly where it belongs. I only found it because I was just about to search the help for advice on where to find it.
Re:Google Gears disabled again?! (Score:3, Informative)
Becuase Gears uses low-level binary hooks (e.g. completely replacing the Firefox HTTP cache with its own) and presumably doesn't want to worry about your browser crashing due to a code change on the Firefox end?