17.0.9 available

17.0.9 is now available from the Downloads tab (release notes). Mozilla has started getting ESR builds out earlier in this week, which thus enables me to get ESR builds earlier to you, assuming they are not pulled or a chemspill occurs. This release fixes issue 239, a patch for an endian problem in methodjit submitted to Mozilla by our friend at Tenfourbird; Mozilla rejected it, though purely for understandable administrative reasons due to the short life left in ESR17, so we're taking it ourselves. By happy coincidence this turns out to also repair long-standing issue 200, a problem with Yandex Mail (and probably other sites relying on JavaScript stricteq). I note by way of self-defense, however, that the bug is actually in Mozilla's code and the testsuite doesn't catch it.

Speaking of JavaScript, BaselineCompiler PowerPC now compiles and successfully passes roughly 3/4ths of the tests, but there are still some significant failures to be repaired. The current roadmap to TenFourFox.next looks like 22.0.2 (sometime next week when the security advisories become available for comparison), followed by 24.0.1 beta (accompanied by 17.0.10, the final 17 release), followed by 24.0.2 release and then an immediate scramble to get 26 off the ground. Obviously if I get a 24 beta working early, this whole time frame can be accelerated, but I am confident we will have 24 ready just in time for the end of 17. There will be one beta cycle to allow our localizers to catch up -- watch issue 42. We'll be loading 24.0.2 final onto our new SourceForge site since the end of downloads on Google Code is just a short four months away, and, you know, phooey on them. Their loss.