Having just offered the Firefox 3.0.2 stability and security update for version 3.0.1, Mozilla is hard at work to produce yet another refresh. Firefox 3.0.2 was released simultaneously with Firefox 2.0.0.17, but while the integration of the latter went as smooth as possible, the latest update for v3.0 brought a regression issue. Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's User Experience Lead indicated that Mozilla identified the problem and is hammering away at another 3.0 update.

“Shortly after releasing Firefox 3.0.2 our QA and Support teams began seeing reports of problems certain users were having with the Firefox Password Manager. This was being caused by non-ASCII data (in domains, logins or passwords) saved as something other than UTF-8 failing to convert back to Unicode which was a regression from a fix to make the Password Manager work on IDN sites with characters over U+0100,” Beltzner explained.

At the time of writing this article, Mozilla already produced a fix which was tested and proved to resolve the regression issue. Beltzner indicated that Beta releases of Firefox 3.0.3 would come as early as next week and that the gold version would arrive soon. Following the implementation of Firefox 3.0.3, the full functionality of Firefox 3.0 will be restored.

“The symptom is that users who have password data stores with non-ASCII data saved as something other than UTF-8 (more common for people who have saved passwords on IDN domains or non en-US domains) will not be able to access their saved passwords or create any new saved passwords. There is no permanent dataloss, the saved data is just inaccessible. While this doesn't affect all Firefox users, it is a significant regression and has triggered a fast-release Firefox 3.0.3,” Beltzner added.

Firefox 3.0.2 and Firefox 2.0.0.17 are available for download here.