Mozilla Firefox 11 Released ~ Security Garden

After a bit of hesitation, Mozilla released Firefox 11 today. As explained in Update on Firefox Release Timing, the update was delay was initially for two reasons.

This Tuesday is Microsoft’s scheduled monthly update to Windows, and those updates have interacted badly with our updates before. We don’t have reason to expect specific problems with this month’s updates, but we’d rather take a day or two to understand the impact before we update all of our users.

We’re also waiting for a report from ZDI about a security vulnerability that may affect this new version of Firefox. We expect to receive the report by end of day Monday. Once we can evaluate the vulnerability, we’ll know whether we need to include a fix in Firefox before the update is released.

What's New

The Release Notes include new and fixed features in version 11. The numerous Bug Fixes are in the link available in References.

NEW --Firefox can now migrate your bookmarks, history, and cookies from Google Chrome
NEW --With Sync enabled, add-ons can now be synchronized across your computers
NEW --The CSS text-size-adjust property is now supported
CHANGED --Redesigned media controls for HTML5 video
HTML5 --The outerHTML property is now supported on HTML elements
HTML5 --View source syntax highlighting now uses the HTML5 parser (see bug 482921)
DEVELOPER --The Style Editor for CSS editing is now available to web developers
DEVELOPER --Web developers can now visualize a web page in 3D using the Page Inspector 3D View
DEVELOPER --SPDY protocol support for faster page loads is now testable
DEVELOPER --XMLHttpRequest now supports HTML parsing
DEVELOPER --Files can now be stored in IndexedDB (see bug 661877)
DEVELOPER --Websockets has now been unprefixed
FIXED --Firefox notifications may not work properly with Growl 1.3 or later (691662)

Known Issues

If you try to start Firefox using a locked profile, it will crash (see 573369)
For some users, scrolling in the main GMail window will be slower than usual (see 579260)
Some synaptic touch pads are unable to vertical scroll (see 622410)
OS X: WebGL performance may be degraded on some hardware (see 713305)
Unresolved on v11 Resolved in v12
Windows: The use of Microsoft's System Restore functionality shortly after updating Firefox may prevent future updates (see 730285)

Update

The upgrade to Firefox 11 will be offered through the browser update mechanism after any impacts related to the Microsoft Security Updates are analyzed. To get the update now, select "Help" from the Firefox menu at the upper left of the browser window, then pick "About Firefox." Mac users need to select "About Firefox" from the Firefox menu.

If you do not use the English language version, Fully Localized Versions are available for download.

References

Remember - "A day without laughter is a day wasted."
May the wind sing to you and the sun rise in your heart...

Tuesday, March 13, 2012