Sunday, January 13, 2019

TenFourFox FPR12b1 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity 12 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). As before, this is a smaller-scope release with no new features, just fixes and improvements. The big changes are a fix for CVE-2018-12404, a holdover security fix from FPR11 that also helps improve JavaScript optimization, and Raphael's hand-coded assembly language AltiVec-accelerated string matching routines with special enhancements for G5 systems. These replace the C routines I wrote using AltiVec intrinsics, which will be removed from our hacked NSPR libc source code once his versions stick.

Unfortunately, we continue to accumulate difficult-to-solve JavaScript bugs. The newest one is issue 541, which affects Github most severely and is hampering my ability to use the G5 to work in the interface. This one could be temporarily repaired with some ugly hacks and I'm planning to look into that for FPR13, but I don't have this proposed fix in FPR12 since it could cause parser regressions and more testing is definitely required. However, the definitive fix is the same one needed for the frustrating issue 533, i.e., the new frontend bindings introduced with Firefox 51. I don't know if I can do that backport (both with respect to the technical issues and the sheer amount of time required) but it's increasingly looking like it's necessary for full functionality and it may be more than I can personally manage.

Meanwhile, FPR12 is scheduled for parallel release with Firefox 60.5/65 on January 29. Report new issues in the comments (as always, please verify the issue doesn't also occur in FPR11 before reporting a new regression, since sites change more than our core does).

2 comments:

  1. Aside from known issues, FPR12b1 has behaved flawlessly for me in a week+ of use, Cameron. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

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