Mozilla is scrambling to fix bugs in its just-released Firefox 3.5 browser. Users are posting complaints about problems across the Web.
Those problems include longer load times and crashes linked to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. The browser also reportedly has problems with Windows XP. Mozilla has set a community "BugDay" for July 7 to address the bugs in open-source Firefox 3.5.
Firefox 3.5.1 is expected to be released later this month to correct some of the 55 published bugs. Firefox 3.5 was released to the public on June 30, although a beta version was released in April.
Among the new features of Firefox 3.5 touted by Mozilla was speed, with the new release said to be twice as fast as Firefox 3.0 and 10 times faster than Firefox 2. Mozilla also pointed to better JavaScript performance, a new Private Browsing mode, and location-based browsing.
Firefox is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and has more than 300 million active users.
The Private Browsing allows Firefox 3.5 users to protect their privacy online. In this mode, nothing viewed on the Web is stored on the user's computer.
Firefox 3.5 also has a Forget this Site feature, which allows users to remove all traces of a site from the browser. A Clear Recent History feature lets users decide what data or activity should be removed.
The Location Aware feature is optional. When turned on, it allows Web sites to provide information based on the user's location.
Firefox 3.5 also includes support for HTML 5 video and audio.
Reader Feedback on This Article:
"The bugday was not done in response to any feedback. It is part of a larger initiative on the part of the Mozilla QA community to increase community participation in Triage of UNCONFIRMED bugs on the Mozilla bug tracking database, Bugzilla (bugzilla.mozilla.org). This bugday had been planned from before Firefox 3.5 was released, and was originally scheduled for June 30th, but was moved because the release of Firefox 3.5 was scheduled over it. If you read the url in the bugday, you can see that June 30 is in it, even though it actually happened on July 7th. This is because we did not want to change the URL after broadcasting it. Also, the original e-mail which I posted on the resuming of bugdays can be found here. You can see we did not plan this in response to complaints, but before Firefox 3.5 was even released. (continued...)
|