Firefox 3.6.6 is out... wow

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Bahamut

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Meaning "Wow, that was freakin' fast" considering 3.6.4 just came out what, 3 days ago...

And what the hell happened to 3.6.5? :D

http://www.getfirefox.com

Anyway, from the release notes:

Firefox 3.6.6 modifies the crash protection feature to increase the amount of time that plugins are allowed to be non-responsive before being terminated.
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So that seems to be the biggest primary change, and they skipped over 3.6.5 completely. Making a backup of my portable Firefox installation and then installing 3.6.6 and will report if things go completely haywire...
 
Here's why. They did the same thing for Firefox 3.6.2 or 3.6.3 (can't remember which)
Firefox 3.6.4 (get the release candidate!) has a platform version of 1.9.2.4. The version number 1.9.2.5 is currently being used by Fennec. We’ll be taking fixes above and beyond that version, so the next platform version Firefox will use will be named 1.9.2.6. We will keep the version numbers coherent by naming it Firefox 3.6.6 (essentially skipping over 3.6.5).
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From what I see, the only change in 3.6.6 is the amount of hang time needed before a plug-in is considered crashed. That would explain it's quick release.

After further looking into it, it looks like this may be a mistake on their site. They didn't have a planned release date until the 2nd or 3rd week of July. Unless they did a last minute change of mind to include much less in this version than they thought they would.
 
More info about the crash wait change, from their blog:

Following the release of Firefox 3.6.4 we heard from some users, mainly those using older computers, that they sometimes expect longer periods of non-responsiveness from plugins, especially with games. For these users the default timeout of 10 seconds was too short. To address this, we increased the amount of time Firefox waits for a plugin to respond before terminating it from 10 to 45 seconds. This change has been made in Firefox 3.6.6, which was released today as an automatic update for all users.
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From the looks of it, 3.6.6. is because of those with older, slower computers. It makes sense in a way-- older and slower the PC is, the non-responsiveness should take longer. (I guess.)

I have 3.6.4 and it isn't available when I do "Check for newer updates..." So, I would have to manually download and upgrade it.
 
THe chief driver for this was that stupid farmville


firefox 3.6.4 detects if a plugin crashes (not responds for 10 seconds) i then kills the process. farmville seems to take more than 10 seconds to load but people are willing to wait that long to play it.
 
octoberasian said:
From the looks of it, 3.6.6. is because of those with older, slower computers. It makes sense in a way-- older and slower the PC is, the non-responsiveness should take longer. (I guess.)

I have 3.6.4 and it isn't available when I do "Check for newer updates..." So, I would have to manually download and upgrade it.
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It will be available shortly. It usually is a day or two behind.

And if it is Farmville that is causing the problem, I can see why they released a patch so fast.
 
~_~ Farmville... for the first time, that I have heard a software update because of a... a Facebook game that's swallows millions of users daily. I can see where priorities lie.
 
I updated and on the update website it says I should update Adobe now. I tried and the update keeps crashing. Anyone else have this problem?
 
Firefox crashing... never..

i stopped using FF cause it would crash every other hour it seemed when opening up numerous tabs and any sites with flash or java.
 
3.6.4 has crashed a few times for me after an entire beta period of no crashing ...

I now see they have moved the release notes from 3.6.6 to 3.6.7 .. and .6 is officially a 'small update' for a single issue and that's it.
 
I've had Firefox crash a few times in 5 years, and I have always had the flash plugin installed. Java on the other hand, I would disable it completely in Firefox because I think it's useless for the most part. I recall it being a big deal back in the day, late 90's early 2000's with applets and such. It's also a terrific platform for malware as it was back in the day. In fact on my new install I didn't even install Java and probably won't, I never need it.
 
Jon55 said:
Yeah I'm curious about this as well.
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read_thread_before_post.gif
 
3.6.6 has been released to Auto Update within the past few minutes. Help->Check for Updates... to grab it if you haven't already.
 
octoberasian said:
From the looks of it, 3.6.6. is because of those with older, slower computers. It makes sense in a way-- older and slower the PC is, the non-responsiveness should take longer. (I guess.)
Click to expand...

Devs and most QAs don't have older computers to test on, so they don't test. For things like this, they have to wait till the build hits the general public where *lots* of people still run on 10-12 year old hardware (with Win2K/WinXP squeezed on it).

It'd be worth it if they'd test more on older shit. You can catch a lot of timing-specific bugs and performances issues. And, as far as performance goes, it's the older hardware that needs the extra performance more anyway.

But, reality is, few care about old shit and you run into things like this.

As far killing not-responding plug-ins (crashing is different), that's kind of dangerous as the ideal timeout varies too much between hardware.
 
bigdogchris said:
3.6.6 has been released to Auto Update within the past few minutes. Help->Check for Updates... to grab it if you haven't already.
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Weird, that's how I got my update when I did - Firefox notified me the update was available; I didn't manually check for it. The update window just popped up and there it was, so I canceled it at that moment, shut Firefox down, made a backup of my Firefox Portable folder "just in case" and then restarted it and hit Help - Check for updates which grabbed it and installed it.

Haven't noticed anything different since that update, and that was about 5 minutes before I created this thread. Wonder why they'd have pulled it from the Auto-Update for such a span of time... :confused:
 
Bahamut said:
Weird, that's how I got my update when I did - Firefox notified me the update was available; I didn't manually check for it. The update window just popped up and there it was, so I canceled it at that moment, shut Firefox down, made a backup of my Firefox Portable folder "just in case" and then restarted it and hit Help - Check for updates which grabbed it and installed it.

Haven't noticed anything different since that update, and that was about 5 minutes before I created this thread. Wonder why they'd have pulled it from the Auto-Update for such a span of time... :confused:
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Dunno. I hit the check for updates several times between the time you created the thread and today and it didn't detect it until now.

Either way, Flash crashed on ebaumsworld a few minutes ago after a few second wait while a video was loading :rolleyes:
 
Not much happening here, ebaumsworld hasn't caused me any issues (not that I visit the site with any regularity but I hopped over and played the first video I saw as noted in the screenshot). Flash plugin kicks in as noted by Task Manager, not much going on outside of the usual:



I wonder sometimes how so many people seem to have so many problems, I seriously truthfully don't with Firefox, nor with plugins. Just checked this machines Reliability Monitor and it's a solid 10, and this installation of Windows 7 Pro was done on May 13th and works great, exactly as I'd expect it to. The only "error" it's had since day 1 was a driver installation - I neglected to run the installer with Admin privileges so, in the long run it's nothing but it's there in the past Reliability history.

Weird...
 
Well it's the first time I've had EW crash the plug-in. Normally what crashes adobe is ads, occasionally a youtube video ... hmm. Really though, it depends what type of sites you visit but also the latency of your connection (long loads of flash content cause it to 'crash' or at least think it has crashed). I have a slow 3Mb DSL. I also go to a lot of entertainment type sites that are full of flash. If you visit those types of sites less frequently or sites with little to no flash, of course I or others with similar browsing habits will see it crash more that you.
 
Bahamut said:
Weird, that's how I got my update when I did - Firefox notified me the update was available; I didn't manually check for it. The update window just popped up and there it was, so I canceled it at that moment, shut Firefox down, made a backup of my Firefox Portable folder "just in case" and then restarted it and hit Help - Check for updates which grabbed it and installed it.
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Well I didn't know Firefox has a release client and a testing client. I apparently have the testing client and just received the 3.6.7 update. You must be on the release client so your updates come at different times than mine.
 
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