Mozilla suspends auto-updates

[Rik]

El Reg reports that:

Other stability bugs have caused Mozilla to suspend automatic updates to the latest full release version of Firefox while it investigates stability bugs. Normally users of the browser will be offered new releases between 24 to 48 hours after they come out, but this is not happening with Firefox 3.6.9 and Firefox 3.5.12, released last week on 7 September.

The releases are still available for manual download but reports of crashes, mostly on startup and on multiple platforms, have prompted Mozilla to hold off on a more widespread roll-out.

"We've limited updates to Firefox 3.6.9 and Firefox 3.5.12 at this time as we evaluate some early feedback which indicates that a subset of our user base may be finding the releases unstable," said Michael Shaver, Mozilla's head of engineering, told Computerworld.

The move is troublesome because Firefox 3.6.9 addresses 15 vulnerabilities, 10 of which Mozilla classifies as critical.

Not so good.

[Simon]

Indeed, not.

[DarkStar]

Had problems with 3.6.9 crashing and also not even starting on Monday so went back to 3.6.8 and everything is fine. Many more problems with FF and I'm going to drop it, Opera 10.62 and Chrome are leaving it in the dust these days.

[zappaDPJ]

I think I said elsewhere, I've been having a few issues with Firefox. I didn't find 3.6.8 to be as stable as previous versions but 3.6.9 is pretty awful. Prior to 3.5.8 I had no issues at all. It seems to be embedded content using Flash causing most of the issues.

Something else I've noticed for a long time is that Firefox does not sit well with applications using TinyMCE, the Javascript WYSIWYG Editor. Copy pasting into the TinyMCE interface is particularly problematical.

[kinmel]

FF is definitely reaching it's sell by date.

[Rik]

A bit like me.

[pctech]

Time to look for another secure browser.

[Simon]

Bring back Netscrape!

[esh]

I really liked Firefox up to and including 1.5, then it kind of diverged from its original goal.... 2 actually was quite slow for me and I swapped over to Opera for a while. These days of Windows 7 I just mix and match opera and IE8 as I feel like it.

That said... I prefer somewhat more frequent updates than the 1-every-3-years IE approach.

[pctech]

Appears to have been restored as my work PC prompted me to install 3.6.10 today.

[zappaDPJ]

I had to do a system restore this morning due to a registry problem. The roll back triggered a lot of Microsoft alerts which I seemed to have missed. One of those alerts was in regard to the Foxit Firefox plug-in. That would appear to be the cause of a lot of my Firefox issues and you don't need to be using the reader for the error to occur. I've removed it.

[Rik]

Have you tried PDFxChange, Zap. I find it a much better app.

[zappaDPJ]

I haven't Rik but I'll take a look, thanks for the recommendation

BTW, and this did amuse me somewhat, the reason I had registry issues was Microsoft's Visual Basic stores 'project' locations in the registry. I never knew this until I tried to restore a damaged project from a backup. Imagine you have an application that saves a massive hierarchy of files with every unique file, has no delete (master) file option and hard codes the file location in the registry. Surely that's an accident waiting to happen? The bottom line it simple wouldn't recognise an older version of the damaged project. To add insult to injury I tried add/remove programs only to find the original Visual Basic project paths left intact 

[Rik]

Only with Microsoft.