Soon after Mozilla was done with the release of Firefox 4, it launched an effort to develop an in-browser PDF viewer built entirely in HTML5 and JavaScript. While the ultimate aim of the project was, and still is, to make PDF.js an integral part of Firefox, the team working on the project has released the reader as a restart-free extension.
Earlier in the week Microsoft unveiled a new online security test to help educate users on the dangers of surfing with outdated browsers. The concept is noble, but they also succeeded in stirring up the Mozilla folks, and with just cause. The site 
Mozilla may have moved to a rapid release cycle, but there are a lot of Firefox users who are still using version 3.6 from the pre-rapid-release-cycle era. The browser vendor on Monday announced that it planned to offer an “advertised update” to Firefox 3.6 users on Thursday, requesting them to update to the latest version of the popular browser. However, there was no sign of such an advertised update on the designated day.
Mozilla just can’t catch any slack; the new, memory-improved Firefox 7.0 is barely off the virtual printing presses and already some users are complaining that the thing is crash-tastic. Not so fast: Mozilla pays attention to those crash reports that users send back, you see, and the company noticed that McAfee’s ScriptScan add-on was the cause of a lot of those fatal errors. In fact, ScriptScan was creating such a high volume of crashes that Mozilla tossed the add-on in their blocklist yesterday.
Firefox’s relatively new rapid release schedule lets developers implement and unveil new features and updates quickly, but there’s one thing we hate about it. No, it’s not the headache it causes enterprise users, although that sucks, too. It’s the constant update notifications. Geez, Firefox needs to update again, we get it already! Fortunately, Mozilla gets that we get that, and they’re looking to move to silent updates sometime in 2012.
Time and browser updates wait for no one. Even though Firefox 7’s reign as the latest stable release of the browser is just two days old, the countdown to version 8 has already begun. Firefox 8 is now available in the beta channel for testing on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.
While still news, the release of a new browser version of Firefox - or even Chrome for that matter - is not the kind of earth-shattering event it used to be before Mozilla adopted a rapid release schedule. But the latest stable release of the Firefox is noteworthy as it is said to address an issue that has rankled users for many years now. Yes, we are talking about the notorious memory leak problem.
It took mankind well over six years to go from Firefox 1.0 to Firefox 4.0, but less than five months to proceed to version 6.0 from there. Not to mention that the next version is due out in late September. But some Mozilla developers aren’t satisfied with the current rapid release schedule the open-source outfit adopted earlier this year. Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas recently put forth a proposal to further expedite the release process.
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