Firefox 3.0 RC3 Fixes Critical Mac Bug

Jun 11

Firefox 3.0 RC3 Fixes Critical Mac Bug

firefox mac-1.png It looked like Mozilla was ready to ship Firefox 3 with the last Release Candidate, but a critical bug surfaced that they couldn’t ignore. So Mozilla is rushing out a Firefox 3 RC3 that fixes only this one bug, and only Mac OS X users need to make the upgrade. Firefox 3 RC3 for both Windows and Linux are the same as Firefox 3 RC2.

It turns out that the bug has to do with the recent update Apple issued to their operating system. For that reason you have to be running Mac OS X 10.5.3 in order to experience the problem, and even still there is no guarantee that it will happen to you. Here are the steps one user said they could take to reproduce the problem:

Delete the Firefox profile folder located at: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox
Start Firefox
Close Firefox
Delete the Firefox profile folder (again) located at: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox
Start Firefox, and after a few seconds it will hang

The problem is also said to affect users of Firefox 2.0.0.14, and the fix has already been prepared for Firefox 2.0.0.15 which is slated for release on June 24th. The release of Firefox 3.0 is still on track for June 2008.

Mac users can download the latest Firefox 3 RC3 by selecting their language below. Remember, there’s no need for Windows and Linux users to download this because it’s exactly the same as Firefox 3 RC2.