Firefox 3.5 gets first patch

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 6 Jul 2009 at 11:35

Mozilla has announced its first patch for the recently released Firefox 3.5, as it looks to stamp out persistent bugs in the TraceMonkey rendering engine.

Firefox 3.5.1 is slated for release in mid July and will include fixes for three significant bugs and "topcrashes" that have shown up since launch. Topcrashes is the term given to any frequently reported crashes within the browser.

Chief among these topcrashes is a problem affecting TraceMonkey, the new JavaScript engine that debuted in Firefox 3.5.

Though considered the browser's headline new feature, TraceMonkey has proved something of a millstone around Firefox's neck and was one of the major causes of its six-month delay.

However, delays are not on the agenda for Firefox 3.5.1: "[The] goal of this release should be a quick turnaround that fixes topcrashes and bugs we almost held ship for," Mozilla writes in its developer's notes.

Mozilla recorded around 6.5 million downloads of Firefox 3.5 in the first 36 hours of release, a far cry from the 8.3 million of Firefox 3 in its first 24 hours. However, that browser was backed by a huge, if ultimately ill-fated, PR campaign that encouraged so many people to download it the servers crashed under weight of numbers.