The browser hasn't been delayed in a very long time

Jul 1, 2015 12:39 GMT  ·  By

The first Firefox 39 stable release was supposed to be unveiled by the end of June, but it looks like it's being delayed due to a stability issue.

Mozilla is not usually late with new Firefox releases, but the 39.x branch seems to be an exception. The developers have decided to postpone the Firefox 39 release due a stability problem, and it will be a few days late. This would be a problem, but Mozilla hasn't missed a launch date for quite a while. This is the why the users who closely follow the release schedule have noticed it immediately.

The only mention of this delay was made in a blog post, that's part of a series called Trainspotting, which aims to detail some of the new features that are supposed to land in each new branch of the browser. "Note: Firefox 39 has been delayed due to a last-minute stability issue. It will be released later this week. We’ll update this post when the release occurs. Stay tuned!" reads the entry on hacks.mozilla.org.

There is no particular mention of the problem that got the Mozilla devs to delay the entire project, but it's likely we'll know more about it after the official launch, that should happen by the end of the week.

What's new in Firefox 39

Firefox 39 promises to bring better feature for the Hello messenger service, ARIA 1.1 support, Unicode 8.0 skin tone emoji support, SafeBrowsing malware detection lookups for Linux, numerous HTML5 improvements, better performance when falling back from IPv6 to IPv4, and various other fixes.

As you might notice, this is not the most exciting release we've seen, so it's not like people have been really waiting for it. In any case, the most interesting aspect of this release will be finding out what happened and why the project got delayed.

Since Firefox never gets delayed, it's safe to assume that whatever happened affected the application at a deeper level. Usually, stability issues means that the application crashes from one of the new features or from a regression.

Software ships with bugs all the time, but only the most important ones get fixed. If there is an issue that's causing the application to crash, but it's extremely rare, it's likely it won't get fixed.

Mozilla delaying a new stable Firefox means that it's not a rare occurrence and it needs to be repaired before launch.

Update: A few out our readers have provided the link to the bug in question. From the looks of it only the Windows version was affected and it seems to be related to some malware issues.