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Firefox 3.5.1 Released

Posted by timothy on from the dot-oh-always-begs-for-fixes dept.

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!"

16 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. I'd fix bugs and contribute quality code by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    But I need build instructions and test instructions and possibly a youtube video, written/made for a student, not for a programmer that already knows a number of things about firefox. That is the way I feel about most open-source projects. I don't want to contribute in huge quantities, but only bugfixes, in any area and not limited to any particular technology. Sadly, I see such build-instructions missing or the build-instructions are too complicated in major open-source projects that could use bug-fixers early in the cycle.

    1. Re:I'd fix bugs and contribute quality code by EsbenMoseHansen · · Score: 4, Informative

      Here, let me click on the top link for "firefox build instructions" in google: simple firefox build. Looks pretty standard to me. Tests, if there are any, are usually automated or findable by a similar exercise.

      --
      Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
  2. slow start for _some_ by asa · · Score: 4, Informative

    Your post says "but also fixes the annoying slow-startup on Windows." which suggests that all Windows users were experiencing slow starts. That's not the case at all. It was only a small fraction of users affected by the now fixed issue. And for the record, the security flaw was already fixed, even before it was lifted from our bug database and turned into a public exploit. It just takes a few days to get everything in order for a release to users.

    1. Re:slow start for _some_ by cratermoon · · Score: 2, Informative

      No less a personage than Brendan Eich says the whole issue with slow startup in the NSS module is snake oil that does nothing but "waste users' time at startup pretending to scrape entropy off the filesystem."

    2. Re:slow start for _some_ by TheSeer2 · · 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.

    3. Re:slow start for _some_ by ahecht · · 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".

    4. Re:slow start for _some_ by klui · · Score: 4, Informative

      OS dependent. They coded for the case where Windows CE/2000 did not have a certain call and they wanted to get good entropy for their RNG in NSS. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501605

  3. Re:Blue screen by EsbenMoseHansen · · Score: 4, 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?

    --
    Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
  4. Re:Someone tell Canonical. by xaxa · · Score: 4, Informative

    I installed it ages ago:

    aptitude install firefox-3.5

    http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=names&keywords=firefox-3.5

  5. Re:Someone tell it to Canonical. by Eighty7 · · Score: 3, Informative

    https://launchpad.net/~fta/+archive/ppa

    Just add the fta repository & install "firefox-3.5". They even link to a mozilla daily build repository if that's your thing.

  6. Re:Blue screen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Using proprietary drivers, perhaps?

    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.

  7. Re:Someone tell it to Canonical. by Haiyadragon · · 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.

  8. Re:Someone tell it to Canonical. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ubuntu uses update-alternatives to select between different packages providing the same functionality

    to see which browsers are installed:

    update-alternatives --list x-www-browser

    to select firefox-3.5:

    update-alternatives --set x-www-browser /usr/bin/firefox-3.5

  9. Re:version numbers by Rhapsody+Scarlet · · Score: 4, 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.

  10. In case you can't find it... by wembley+fraggle · · 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.

  11. Re:Google Gears disabled again?! by BZ · · Score: 2, 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?