New version of Firefox up for grabs on the desktop

Sep 2, 2020 09:42 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox browser, this time with the focus exclusively on fixing issues in the application.

Firefox 80.0.1 is the very first revision to version 80, and according to the official changelog, there are five different fixes in this build, and all of them are equally important for users.

The following fixes are part of the recently released Firefox 80.0.1:  

  • Fixed a performance regression when encountering new intermediate CA certificates (bug 1661543)
  • Fixed crashes possibly related to GPU resets (bug 1627616)
  • Fixed rendering on some sites using WebGL (bug 1659225)
  • Fixed the zoom-in keyboard shortcut on Japanese language builds (bug 1661895)
  • Fixed download issues related to extensions and cookies (bug 1655190)

While the performance regression bug was first discovered only a few days ago, the GPU resets issue that Mozilla is linking to was first reported five months ago, with the fix first published in the Nightly build.

Faster release cadence

According to a Mozilla engineer, this is how the patch resolves the problem in this Firefox update:

“The patch adds a null pointer check, which avoids the crash. The resulting rendering might not be completely correct, since the mask surface (inferred from crash report stacktraces) is not available, but this should be preferable and recoverable as opposed to crash.”

Needless to say, users are recommended to download the new Firefox version as soon as possible, especially if they previous came across the bugs that are detailed here.

Firefox now gets major updates every four weeks, as compared to six according to Mozilla’s old update policy, so fixes like the one released today also arrive at a faster pace. Whether or not Mozilla’s accelerated release cadence is paying off is something that is yet to be determined.