Firefox Update Kills Bugs, Adds Mac Support

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "Several vulnerabilities are fixed in version Firefox 1.5.0.2, which was released on Thursday. In addition to security patches Firefox now includes some stability enhancements and, as expected, includes native support for Apple Computer's Macs with Intel processors. Secunia has a detailed advisory about vulnerabilities fixed with this release."

Themes and extensions keep working

[Anonymous Coward]

This time around, almost all extension and theme authors got the version dependency right, so unlike after the previous update, your extensions and themes won't be disabled. It's a security update, so do install it.

What's new in Firefox 1.5.0.2

[anandpur]

From Burning Edge:
http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.5 .0.2.html [squarefree.com]

Some leaks fixed

[EggyToast]

Here's the big ones, IMO, from a mac user's perspective:

• Memory leaks
• 321283 - Using Find causes documents to leak.
• 323532 - Leak when using history autocomplete.
• 323377 - Lots of leaks in nsInternetSearchService.

Numerous times would I come home to see Firefox using over a gig of memory and eating up about 40% of my proc cycles. A quick quit/restart of the app would fix it, but still -- I regularly close tabs and don't develop long histories on multiple open tabs, so it didn't make any sense.

I just hope that those leaks are the ones I was actually experiencing...

SeaMonkey too

[Anonymous Coward]

SeaMonkey was updated to version 1.0.1 for security reasons too

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/releases / [mozilla.org]

Yeah

[springbox]

The original poster might want to read this: Firefox "Memory Leak" is a Feature [slashdot.org]

Mac Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify, Firefox has long had Mac support. This distribution adds Universal Binary support so that Firefox is now native for Intel Macs.

Re:It still leaks!

[hal9000(jr)]

I have found most of the memory leak issues are when using Java applets. Oh, and parsing a 35Mb XML file, memory usaged soared to over 1.5 GB and kept climbing.

Re:Some leaks fixed

[bahwi]

They fixed a serious bug that was affecting me in the moz branch, that was ported over to the xulrunner nightlies. Apparently I was creating too many JS Obj's and crashing out the system. Now it works perfectly with my thousands of javascript objects, mwa-ha-ha. =)

But seriously, it's a CRM app loading stats from an XML source on the server side, and when using E4X you get an XML Object for each XML file(or entry, depending) so it's easy and quick when running yearly stats to generate a bunch of objects. But now it works like a charm, smooth, and fast. The only prob is it's a 1.8.0.2 nightly, not a release. But working is working.

still got memory leaks out the wazoo

[Tumbleweed]

But the good news is, that about:config trick where you minimize your window, then maximize it again still works.

colgroup bug still exists

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla/Firefox still ignores the ALIGN attribute within a COLGROUP element:
<colgroup align="center">

This is a longstanding bug yet to be fixed.

Re:Themes and extensions keep working

[christopherfinke]

This is because the maxVersion in the extensions for 1.5.0.1 in the majority of cases is 1.5.0.*, so if your extensions work with 1.5.0.1 and 1.5.0.2, they'll be compatible with any future security upgrades for this branch.

Re:What's new in Firefox 1.5.0.2

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

264787 - [Mac] Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab Next/Previous Tab Keyboard Shortcuts no longer work (worked in Firefox 1.0.x).

Thank God! I've been waiting for this, I couldn't for the life of me understand why this no longer worked on the mac version. I also just found out that you can change firefox's keybindings to be emacs-like [mozillazine.org] on any platform. Actually that article shows you how to change the keybindings to be like anything you want, they just use emacs as an example.

Re:It still leaks!

[Anonymous Coward]

All platforms.

All versions since 1.0, at least.

Tried even disabling all extensions.

Browsing webpages for a length of time.

I would say its a leak. Why else would FF eat near a gig of ram with no tabs open and staring at a blank page?

Re:"Fixes some security issues"?

[YU Nicks NE Way]

That's what I thought, too, but, in fact, no. Per Secunia's summary of sources:

1, 9, 10, 12, 18, 20) shutdown
2) Igor Bukanov
3) Bernd Mielke
4) Alden D'Souza
5) Martijn Wargers
6) Bob Clary
7) Tristor
8) Michael Krax
11, 14, 21) moz_bug_r_a4
13, 16) TippingPoint and the Zero Day Initiative
17) Claus Jørgensen and Jesse Ruderman
19) Georgi Guninski

Metasploit isn't mentioned anywhere.

Re:colgroup bug still exists

[hclyff]

Maybe it's because there isn't supposed to be an 'align' attribute?

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#h-11 .2.4 [w3.org]

FF configuration to reclaim leaked memory

[Tumbleweed]

Here's the URL I got it from:
reclaim leaked memory [cybernetnews.com]

In case this poor bastard's site gets Slashdotted, here's the trick:

      1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
      2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
      3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
      4. Now select True and then press Enter.
      5. Restart Firefox.

Once you've restarted, and been using FF awhile, minimize it, then bring it back, and the system (under Windows, anyway) will have reclaimed leaked memory (often LOTS of it). A new notice on that page says this works with Thunderbird, too, so I'll have to try that when I get to work.

In other news...

[Rytis]

Firefox is reported to pass the ACID2 test [flickr.com] as well. Though it's just a development branch and there's still a load of work to do, it's nice to see they are finally getting to the finish.

Re:It still leaks!

[Dan Ost]

Set browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0 and see if that helps. If it does, then
you're not dealing with a memory leak (or at least, not an accidental one...they put this
in there on purpose).

I'm running 1.5.0.1 on gentoo linux (no gnome or kde) and experience no memory leak. I often
leave it running for days and, while my memory footprint varies with usage, it doesn't appear
to be behaving baddly (memory usage always approaches a base level after I finish most of my
browsing).

Re:Yeah

[starwed]

Also interesting is this thread [mozillazine.org] in the mozillazine forums.

Re:Why not 1.5.1?

[Kelson]

Because they switched to a more detailed numbering scheme with 1.5.

Given: x.y.z.w

x.y are the major/minor version numbers.
z is for an update that changes the API.
w is for an update that doesn't change the API.

This way they can distinguish between updates that are likely to break* extensions (Firefox 1.5.1) and those that theoretically should not (Firefox 1.5.0.2).

*By which I mean actually breaking functionality, requiring programming changes to the extension -- not just needing to bump the extension's compatibility label.

Re:Themes and extensions keep working

[Ark42]

You didn't read the message when you clicked later. The message said that an updated was already downloaded and ready to be installed. It asksed if you wanted to install it now (and restart Firefox now) or install it later (when you next restart Firefox).

In the options under Advanced/Update the default is "Automatically download and install the update" but you can change that to "Ask me what I want to do" if you want. Of course, the "Warn me if this will disable extensions of themes" box is also checked by default, but I'm not sure how much that works. I think it just checks if the extension disabled itself because of the maxversion flag it has set maybe. That doesn't mean it will work for sure though, since extension authors can't predict these kind of things.