Firefox 2.0.0.11 Released

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Saturday December 1, 2007 @05:37AM from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.

BrianAU writes "Firefox 2.0.0.11 has been released, the Release Notes show the only major change as a correction of a compatibility issue with some websites and extensions as discovered in Firefox 2.0.0.10."

9 of 199 comments (clear)

one sentence summary and it makes front page.. by LingNoi · 2007-12-01 05:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

Firefox 2.0.0.11 has been released, the Release Notes show the only major change as a correction of a compatibility issue with some websites and extensions as discovered in Firefox 2.0.0.10.
If you think it wasn't that big of a change then why did you sumbit it to Slashdot?!
1. Re:one sentence summary and it makes front page.. by calebt3 · 2007-12-01 05:44 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You'd be amazed what goes into the Firehose. The fact that it actually made it through is a bit mind-boggling though.
As if this is news? by garcia · 2007-12-01 05:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

Maybe it was different in the past when software didn't automatically tell its users to upgrade but now that Firefox reminds you automatically when a new release is out I don't see the reason why Slashdot would put this on the front page... Not only that but this release was pushed out yesterday (or the day before, I can't recall when I picked it up). In addition to even that aside, 2.*.10 was out just several days before that and was a bigger update. If anything, we should have heard about that instead and not this minor fix.

Until the "editors" stop pushing garbage through w/o letting the firehose "fix" stupid submissions, Slashdot will continue to lag other sites in the quality coming through. If you really want to keep it up let the firehose do its job -- if not, let it degrade to the steaming pile that is Digg and be done with it already.
1. Re:As if this is news? by Excors · 2007-12-01 06:13 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  The interesting thing is that it was the fastest ever release of a browser update. John Resig gives most of the details: A security patch in Firefox 2.0.0.10 was incorrectly checked in, and introduced a bug which was not caught by the testing process. That was only discovered after the release, so the code was fixed and the whole release process had to start up again. Three days later, the 2.0.0.11 update is available for forty languages and three platforms.
  So, it reflects badly on Mozilla's testing efforts, though that is an area where Firefox 3 has made significant improvements with automated testing. It reflects well on their release process, which can push out a critical update in just a few days.
2. Re:As if this is news? by Excors · 2007-12-01 10:36 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  It didn't affect normal images - it broke the drawImage function from the HTML 5 <canvas> element API, which is a fairly new feature and is used relatively rarely but actually quite widely (with ~10 independent bug reports in a couple of days).
  
  Still, I agree it's an unacceptable failure of testing, and I should have said that more strongly. Even the most trivial automated testing of that feature would have caught the problem immediately. Looking at the new tests in Firefox 3, there's still only one which incidentally relies on drawImage. (I have several hundred browser-independent canvas test cases, so I guess I should see if they could be incorporated into Mozilla somehow, to avoid a repeat of this problem in this particular area...)
Re:More Crashes by bunratty · 2007-12-01 05:54 · Score: 4, Insightful

Try the suggestions from the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article Firefox crashes.

--
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
If only... by Gunslinger47 · 2007-12-01 06:05 · Score: 5, Funny

If only there was a way for Firefox users to be automatically notified of new patches.
Re:News behind the news by BZ · 2007-12-01 07:00 · Score: 4, Informative

> The "shoot the messanger" attitude exhibited

Where, exactly? Reading the link you posted I see:

1) Original report
2) 5 comments confirming that it's a problem
3) 1 comment indicating which change caused the problem
4) 1 comment indicating what should be done to fix the problem
5) 1 comment combined with flag changes to make sure there is a regression test in the future
6) 1 comment asking an earlier commenter for the URL to the site they said was broken, to
make sure that it actually gets fixed.
7) 3 comments that say that it's a problem and where
8) A regression test being posted
9) The regression test being checked in
10) Some bugs being marked duplicate
11) The fix being checked in

All that happened over the course of 18 hours. I stopped reading there, since the rest doesn't particularly matter, as far as I can tell.

Where's the problem exactly?
Re:News behind the news by elrendermeister · 2007-12-01 10:22 · Score: 5, Informative

I posted this on an earlier post but I thought it more relevant to re-post here as it's fits in nicely with the above comment.
We were actually one of the companies that found the bug shortly after the release of 2.0.0.10 and if you can't see why this is news then I'm really glad you don't work on my dev team.
Just so we're clear on what the bug ACTUALLY was, the bug specifically effected the canvas drawing capability in the browser. It's not something they test for and frankly, given our experience developing for IE, it's not one they test for either (if IE's random and aberrant behavior is any indication, hell MS can't even make a browser that displays content in a compliant manner given the HTML spec).
A number of sites and web applications use this functionality specifically for navigation, and when Firefox was updated to 2.0.0.10 on many client machines automatically, some business critical web applications were seriously effected. Because of this it was a pretty serious issue.
The reason this IS news is because after confirming the bug and determining the extent of the effect on the user base, the Mozilla folks had nightly builds in our hands just hours after a fix was checked in. This got most of the immediately effected back to work within hours.
A number of us then independently verified the fix against our code and then provided rapid feedback to the team so they could issue a release.
This resulted in an astonishingly fast turnaround. I think the Mozilla folks are to be commended for both not resisting requests for a new release, and the speed with which they were able to respond to a bug effecting business critical web applications. If this had been MS we would have spent 2 weeks navigating mindless support bureaucracy and then fought with management excuses as to why a fix just "can't be turned around overnight." We would have then been forced to contact all of our customers and go into long, boring explanations most of them would never have understood... it's all down hill from there.
Why this IS big news: It is a really bright and shining example of why this type of development is succeeding even in a situation where recursion testing fails (and if you think recursion testing can't fail then you just haven't been developing long enough).
The other good thing that came out of this is we now have a mechanism where developers can subscribe to a mailing list alerting then to pending releases.
Not only did Mozilla respond with a technical fix to the bug AND promptly issue a release which addressed the issue, but they were humble enough to recognize there was a process related problem that needed addressing as well; they fixed that too.
ER