Mozilla has released Firefox 108.0.2 today bringing bug fixes for two high-volume crashes. The first fix addresses a crash related to video playback on Mac OS X 10.12 – 10.14 and the second fix addresses a crash when managing browser history. According to the Bugzilla entries, both of the issues were originally slated for bigger updates in the future, but due to the occurrence of the issues, it was decided that a point release should be pushed to users.
To get these fixes, you just need to update your Firefox install, you can do this by going to the Firefox menu, pressing Help, and then finding About Firefox. The dialog box that appears will let you know if there are any updates available. If you don’t want to mess around, just leave Firefox to install the update automatically in its own time.
The Bugzilla report for the browser history crash is quite interesting, in one of the uplift approval requests it suggests that the crash was “trivial” to fix and that there was an issue with some “ancient code”. It just goes to show how big the codebase of the browser project is that code can sit there long enough unchanged to be called ancient. According to Mozilla Hacks in 2020, Firefox has a huge 21 million lines of code.
Aside from these two important bug fixes, Mozilla, under the Changed section of the release notes, said that the Tabs sharing devices menu for WebRTC has been moved to the tools menu on macOS only. The item was moved because WebRTC dynamically creates this menu entry in the Windows menu on macOS, which could stop working when the list of menu items was modified.
The next major version, Firefox 109, is due for release on January 17. According to the Beta release notes, Manifest Version 3 will be enabled by default in Firefox 109.