Mozilla has announced that it will release Firefox 5.0.1 to fix the web browser's constant crashing on Mac OS X Lion.
The update will fix two specific problems:
● There is a bug present in the upcoming release of OSX 10.7 that causes Firefox to crash when using downloadable fonts. Downloadable fonts are used widely on the web, so users would have suffered severe crash problems. We alerted Apple to the problem before the release of 10.7 but they did not fix the problem before 10.7 went to final release. We've changed the font APIs that we're using to newer versions which appear to fix the problem. Users on 10.6 and before will continue to use the old APIs to reduce risk. Later versions of Firefox will move all 10.6 and later users to the new APIs.
● Apple recently updated Java on OSX 10.5 and it broke the Java plugin in Firefox. Although the number of people using Firefox on 10.5 is quite small, this update fixes Firefox so that it can load the Java plugin on 10.5.
People still running the Firefox 3.6 release of Firefox will also see an update. For 3.6 Mozilla will be disabling downloadable fonts for people running on OSX 10.7. Firefox 3.6 users who upgrade to OSX 10.7 may also see scrollbar rendering issues. For people who see scrollbar issues, we encourage you to upgrade to Firefox 5.
Read More [via Trevor]
The update will fix two specific problems:
● There is a bug present in the upcoming release of OSX 10.7 that causes Firefox to crash when using downloadable fonts. Downloadable fonts are used widely on the web, so users would have suffered severe crash problems. We alerted Apple to the problem before the release of 10.7 but they did not fix the problem before 10.7 went to final release. We've changed the font APIs that we're using to newer versions which appear to fix the problem. Users on 10.6 and before will continue to use the old APIs to reduce risk. Later versions of Firefox will move all 10.6 and later users to the new APIs.
● Apple recently updated Java on OSX 10.5 and it broke the Java plugin in Firefox. Although the number of people using Firefox on 10.5 is quite small, this update fixes Firefox so that it can load the Java plugin on 10.5.
People still running the Firefox 3.6 release of Firefox will also see an update. For 3.6 Mozilla will be disabling downloadable fonts for people running on OSX 10.7. Firefox 3.6 users who upgrade to OSX 10.7 may also see scrollbar rendering issues. For people who see scrollbar issues, we encourage you to upgrade to Firefox 5.
Read More [via Trevor]