Firefox 3.0.3 on way real soon

newsguy 0 358 Views

Hot off the press comes the news that Mozilla is pushing out yet another Firefox update real soon now, Firefox 3.0.3 will be released as soon as possible to fix a rather serious bug in Firefox 3.0.2 which has not long been released itself. In fact, my 3.0.2 update was only pushed to me a couple of days ago, so it really is annoying to know it has added an unwanted bug into my browser.

The official explanation from Mozilla is that "shortly after releasing Firefox 3.0.2 our QA and Support teams began seeing reports of problems certain users were having with the Firefox Password Manager. This was being caused by non-ASCII data (in domains, logins or passwords) saved as something other than UTF-8 failing to convert back to Unicode (see bug 454708) which was a regression from a fix to make the Password Manager work on IDN sites with characters over U+0100."

Which means that users with password data stores including non-ASCII characters that are saved as anything other than UTF-8 cannot, er, actually access them or create any new saved passwords for that matter.

"There is no permanent dataloss" Mozilla assures us, adding "the saved data is just inaccessible."

Well that's OK then. Not.

Mozilla admits that this represents a "significant regression" and so has triggered a fast-release Firefox 3.0.3 process to fix this single issue. Indeed, I am told that the fix has been landed and tested, and updates will be released on the beta channel by early next week with a full release to follow soon after.

Dani AI

Generated

A few practical notes to add to ’s report and ’s confirmation that 3.0.3 was available: Mozilla pushed 3.0.3 quickly to fix a password-manager regression introduced in 3.0.2, so anyone who still has 3.0.2 installed should update as soon as possible. The regression was related to how non-ASCII/encoded entries were handled, which made some saved logins inaccessible until the fix landed. (blog.mozilla.org)

Immediate action (if passwords matter): quit Firefox and make a full copy of your profile folder before doing anything else. At minimum copy the password-related files so you have a safe fallback: signons.sqlite and your key database (key3.db) — and keep any -journal file if present. Example Windows profile paths:

Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\

Vista/7:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\

Always copy with Firefox closed. (support.mozilla.org)

If you already updated to 3.0.2 and cannot see saved passwords: install 3.0.3 (the official fix). If that does not restore entries but you have a pre-update backup, restore signons.sqlite and key3.db into the profile with Firefox closed, then restart and check Saved Passwords. If you used a master password, keep key3.db — it contains the decryption keys and is required for recovery. (blog.mozilla.org)

After recovery, export or record critical credentials and start doing routine profile backups (or use a dedicated password manager) so a single regression or profile loss won’t lock you out again. If problems persist after trying the steps above, include the exact Firefox build and profile file timestamps when asking for help — that information shortens troubleshooting. (support.mozilla.org)

Member Avatar for peter_budo
peter_budo 2,532 Code tags enforcer

Already downloaded update 3.0.3 :)
How long it would take Microsoft to fix such issue? Weeks, months? Well we can only guess...

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