Mozilla rushes out an update for Firefox 3.6.4 to counter reports that the most recent browser versions is somewhat allergic to the most recent Adobe Flash plug-in v10.1.63.54. Mozilla recommends all users of Firefox 3.x to install the new version 3.6.6.
Firefox 3.6.6 was released well ahead of schedule earlier today and includes just one fix that addresses an apparently significant problem of frequent Flash plug-in crashes as well as performance slowdowns. User reports indicate that only Flash is affected 10.1.63.54 and that a downgrade to the to the (less secure) Flash 10.0.45.2 gets rid of the crashes. Mozilla had originally planned to release Firefox 3.6.6 just before the Black Hat conference, which will open its doors on July 24. That update is now labeled as Firefox 3.6.7 and is scheduled for a July 20 release.
Mozilla blamed the Flash crashes on the amount of time Firefox will wait before terminating unresponsive plugins. Firefox 3.6.4 introduced out-of-process plug-in support, also called crash protection. When a plug-in crashes, users can reload the Web page to restart the plug-in and continue browsing instead of having to restart the entire browser. When a plug-in freezes, Firefox closes the unresponsive plug-in after waiting 10 seconds. Apparently, this time frame was to tight and some plug-ins that appeared to be frozen were not really frozen.
“Following the release of Firefox 3.6.4 we heard from some users, mainly those using older computers, that they sometimes expect longer periods of non-responsiveness from plug-ins, especially with games,” Mozilla wrote on the Firefox release blog. “For these users the default timeout of 10 seconds was too short. To address this, we increased the amount of time Firefox waits for a plug-in to respond before terminating it from 10 to 45 seconds. This change has been made in Firefox 3.6.6, which was released today as an automatic update for all users.”
The manual download can be found here.
Mozilla previously said that it is skipping version 3.6.5 as 3.6.4 has the platform number 1.9.2.4 and Fennec currently uses 1.9.2.5. The fix in 3.6.6 turns Firefox to platform version 1.9.2.6. To keep the platform number and browser version consistent, Mozilla decided to skip the “5” and go directly to 3.6.6.
Update 11:21PM: It appears that version 3.6.6 has some crash problems as well. One of our readers reported an issue with the latest Norton update (see comments below), while Mozilla’s crash report tool indicates that Firefox 3.6.6 is vulnerable to Skype crashes, which, however, seem to be limited to Windows NT 6.0, 6.0 SP1 and SP 2.
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