Mac bug forces Mozilla to Firefox 3.0 RC3
A change that Apple
Inc. made in its latest update to Mac
OS X forced Mozilla
Corp. to issue a third release candidate for Firefox
3.0, according to notes from a status meeting the company held Tuesday.
As of 3 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Mozilla had seeded its download site with Release
Candidate 3 (RC3).
The bug, which affected only the Mac version of the open-source browser, caused
some systems to hang or crash at startup or shutdown. According to Bugzilla,
Mozilla's bug-tracking and management system, the problem was traced to a change
Apple made to "VerifiedDownloadPlugin" in Mac OS X 10.5.3.
Apple
released 10.5.3 two weeks ago to fix more than 100 stability and security
bugs.
Mozilla developers reported the problem to Apple. According to someone identified
only as "philippe," who submitted the bug to Apple, the company's
engineers e-mailed him to say: "After further investigation it has been
determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated
by engineering."
However, Mozilla executives were unwilling to wait for a fix from Cupertino.
"Anything we do in our application will be a workaround; any real fix has
to come from Apple, on their timeline," Mike Shaver, Mozilla's chief evangelist,
noted in a message yesterday on the Bugzilla thread discussing the patch. Rather
than wait -- a potentially long wait, since others on Bugzilla confirmed that
an unreleased 10.5.4 update to Mac OS X also contained the flaw -- Shaver created
a workaround that prevented the at-fault plug-in from loading. Shaver's workaround
was added to the Firefox code Tuesday.
No changes were made to the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox 3.0; instead,
what had been set as last
week's RC2 was simply renamed RC3.
Mozilla was even unsure about the purpose of the Apple plug-in. "I'm worried
that the plug-in is part of Apple's download security scheme," said Ben
Turner on Bugzilla a week ago. "Maybe it's this plug-in that is responsible
for marking downloaded executables as coming from the Internet." But others,
including Shaver, thought it safe to disregard VerifiedDownloadPlugin because
Apple's own Safari
Web browser doesn't bother to load it.
It's not clear how, or even whether, RC3 will affect the release schedule of
Firefox 3.0; previously, company officials had set a mid-month deadline for
shipping a final version. Mozilla did not reply to several e-mails and phone
calls Wednesday.
Firefox
3.0 RC3 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 43 languages
from Mozilla's site.
» posted by abennett
Computerworld
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