Categories: Firefox

Update on Firefox Release Timing

UPDATE: The security bug reported by ZDI is one we had already identified and fixed through our internal processes. This eliminates the need for us to delay this week’s releases, and we will be shipping them later today. However, in order to understand the impacts of Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday” fixes, we will initially release Firefox for manual updates only. Once those impacts are understood, we’ll push automatic updates out to all of our users.

——————————————————————————————————————————–

Every six weeks, another Firefox train leaves the station. This week we will release another update, but not on Tuesday as we typically do. There are two reasons for this:

  1. This Tuesday is Microsoft’s scheduled monthly update to Windows, and those updates have interacted badly with our updates before. We don’t have reason to expect specific problems with this month’s updates, but we’d rather take a day or two to understand the impact before we update all of our users.
  2. We’re also waiting for a report from ZDI about a security vulnerability that may affect this new version of Firefox. We expect to receive the report by end of day Monday. Once we can evaluate the vulnerability, we’ll know whether we need to include a fix in Firefox before the update is released.

We’ll update our post here once the latest version of Firefox is available to the world. In the meantime, if you want to get an advance peek at what’s coming in future versions of Firefox, check out one of our early release channels.

Johnathan Nightingale
Senior Director of Firefox Engineering