Firefox 3.5.1 Released

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!"

Comments

Re:FROSTY PISS

[theheadlessrabbit]

I have yet to see a single blue screen on Linux.

FOSS isn't perfect, it's just a whole lot better than one of the competitors.

and I enjoy my FOSS haven very much, thank you.

Good.

[xlotlu]

Now I can re-enable TraceMonkey and slashdot will be fast again... sorta.

Re:slow start for _some_

[Anonymous Coward]

And what should he have written instead of "It addresses that security issue"? "It contains the security fix that already existed but wasn't until now ready for a release to users"? Ugh.

Google Gears disabled again?!

[sakis]

Kind of offtopic, but by upgrading to FF 3.5.1, Google Gears is again disabled. Why did Google allowed it to be compatible with only 3.5.0?!

Re:Google Gears disabled again?!

[Threni]

Perhaps their time machine isn't working and they couldn't check that future releases worked, and decided it was safer to only support version of Firefox they're sure about. You can always wait, if it's important for you, or upgrade then downgrade again if you didn't want to check first and have to have it working for you. It's better than the alternative - Google allowing what is essentially an untested upgrade.

Re:Blue screen

[Anonymous Coward]

You can hardly call it a complete freeze if "only" X is frozen. Still pretty annoying but as you say you can usually recover by killing and restarting X.

Re:Blue screen

[msuarezalvarez]

Ironically though, SSH access to the box still typically works...

That is not ironic: it is good design...

Re:Blue screen

[TheLink]

> Still pretty annoying but as you say you can usually recover by killing and restarting X.

a) If you are a "Desktop Linux" user running actual Desktop applications, that means you lose most of your unsaved work (if there is a way to not lose the unsaved work, please let me know).
b) If you use X as just a way to run screen/vi/emacs and browsers, then you are less affected.

Basically if I let my mom/uncle/aunt use "Desktop Linux" and X locks up, it's effectively as bad as a BSOD for them.

Saying X freezing is not a problem since you can usually recover by killing and restarting it is like saying that Windows 95 is stable as long as you regularly shutdown/exit to dos and type win to restart it[1].

[1] you could actually do that in the old days of Win 95 :).

Firefox 3.5.1 released

[Anonymous Coward]

so can anyone tell me why Firefox felt like it had to scan my hard drive in the first place? i had it set to delete history on exit. why then did it feel like it had to go looking in *other* programs' folders for history files?

Re:Blue screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Hrm? It seems that X completely locked up with no way to reset it. The fact that other processes such as sshd are unaffected is of small consolation if you don't have another terminal to access them. A better design would be to allow the user some way to kill/restart X on the same machine (most people only have one machine.) The fact that if X goes down, it also eats all user input (except the power/reset button) seems not such a good design to me...

Re:slow start for _some_

[bunratty]

I have never understood why people make such a big deal over Firefox startup times. It's a few seconds. On my two-year-old laptop, Firefox 3.5.1 starts in two seconds. Granted, Chrome starts in less than one second, but in absolute difference it's about a second.

Re:Blue screen

[geekboy642]

tee? Really? What the hell sort of DESKTOP APPLICATIONS produce all of their output on the terminal? OpenOffice? GIMP? KMail? GVim?

No, the only solution is the Jesus rule. Save your files. Save them early, save them often. Not just because the system is going to crash, but because you never know when the power will fail, lightning will strike, or a cow-orker will trip over your power cord.

Re:I'd fix bugs and contribute quality code

[turgid]

The majority of us use Windows, and will therefore probably want to develop on that platform.

Right...

Seriously, if you think this is a "simple" build procedure that's going to get casual volunteers contributing small fixes, you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

All that proprietary closed-source software required to build Open Source software (any software, really). Difficult to obtain, difficult to install and difficult to configure.

It sounds like Windows is the problem. All of those development tools are standard on Linux (your distro comes with them) and they're all configured ready to use "out of the box" when you install them (if they're not installed by default).

You will find that unix-like OSes are far more user-friendly as development environments. It's no accident that GNU chose unix to embrace and extend. That's why all of this open source stuff is for Linux first and foremost.

As more of you come to find this out first-hand, more of you will switch away from Windows to a Linux, Mac OS X or *BSD.