Mozilla Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 Works Around Mac OS X BugWednesday June 11th, 2008A third release candidate of Mozilla Firefox 3 has been issued with a workaround for a bug introduced in the latest 10.5.3 update of Mac OS X. The problem causes the operating system to hang on shutdown if an application tries to open the VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin file, which is a browser plugin included in OS X and accessed by Firefox under certain circumstances. Though the bug is not caused by Mozilla code, the developers have decided to include a workaround in Firefox 3 to prevent users from being exposed to the hang. The problem has also been reported to Apple. Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 can be downloaded from the Firefox release candidates download page or the 3.0rc3 directory of releases.mozilla.org. Existing Firefox 3 release candidate testers can also upgrade using the built-in software update feature of the browser. Note that although RC3 builds are available for Windows and Linux, they do not contain any changes from RC2; only the OS X builds are different. The Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 Release Notes contain general information about the improvements in Firefox 3. Technical information about the specific OS X 10.5.3 VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin issue can be found in bug 436575. Interested community members are invited to take part in a Firefox 3 RC3 Testday on Friday. The virtual event will take place in the #testday irc.mozilla.org channel on Friday 11th June between 7:00am and 5:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (2:00pm Friday to midnight Saturday UTC/GMT). As well as Firefox 3, the VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin bug introduced by OS X 10.5.3 also affects Firefox 2. For this reason, the workaround has been checked in to the 1.8 branch and will presumably be included in the next minor update of Firefox 2. Other Mozilla-based applications may also be impacted. Update: The Firefox 3 RC3 Testday will take place on Friday 13th June, not the non-existent Friday 11th June as stated above. Failed. |