Mozilla Updates Firefox 3.5.5 for 'Annoying' Bugs Firefox 3.5.5 Released to Address Stability Issues Sean Michael Kerner
From the 'Quick Fix' files:
For the most part, Mozilla issues updates to its open source Firefox browser that address both security and stability related issues. That's not the case with the new 3.5.5 update.
Firefox 3.5.5 has no listed security fixes and is all about fixing a few key stability bugs.
The official list of bugs fixed in the 3.5.5 update actually only includes five fixed items, of which three are labeled by Mozilla as being critical.
One of the critical bugs in the fixed list deals with crashes in Firefox's GIF image decoder. The flaw was introduced in the Firefox 3.5.4 release, which came out on October 28th. The GIF flaw was reported in Mozilla bugzilla bug tracking system by Toronto staffer Joe Drew (JOE DREW!!) on October 29th.
"We're seeing lots of crashes in the GIF decoder, involving nsGIFDecoder2::ProcessData calling GifWrite(), then a null dereference," Drew wrote in the bugzilla entry. "Right now, this is showing up in the noted crash site, but this is a Windows-specific, 3.5.4-specific crash site, since the offset in xul.dll will change with every build, and obviously xul.dll has no meaning on OS X or Linux."
Aha! So that's why I didn't notice any 'big' issues with Firefox 3.5.4 myself, I run Linux and wasn't (personally) affected by the GIF flaw. Seeing as GIFs are pervasive across the Web, this can be one very annoying flaw that could potentially have triggered frequent crashes of Firefox.
The other two critical fixes are also crash-related items, one of which is a startup crash related to font handling.
No, these are not major security issues, but annoying issues like these that negatively impact user experience are something that needs to be addressed rapidly — which is precisely what Mozilla has done.
From the 'Quick Fix' files:
