Mozilla Offers Stability Update to Firefox

It doesn't include planned Leopard enhancements, but Firefox developers have released an update to their open-source software, fixing bugs that had been causing the browser to crash at startup, render Web pages improperly or disable add-ons for some users.

The Firefox 2.0.0.9 update, released Thursday, is considered a "stability" fix and does not address any security issues, according to release notes posted by Firefox's parent company, Mozilla.

Windows Vista-based systems that were reporting "Java not found" errors while running the browser, should see an improvement with this release, as should some Windows users who were seeing their browser crash on startup, Mozilla said.

Mozilla developers had been hoping to fix several bugs in the recent Leopard release of the Mac OS X operating system with this release, but they did not make the 2.0.0.9 release, according to Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. "There are some issues in Leopard that we want to address soon -- but they did not get finished in time," he said via e-mail.

The most significant of these bugs is a flaw that prevents drop down menus from working on some Web sites, he said.