How to Get a Complete Firefox Change Log

Jul 18, 2007

MozillaZine has announced that Firefox 2.0.0.5 has been released (though, as of this writing, I still don't see it via auto-update). I enjoy looking through change logs (weird as that may seem), so for every new Firefox release, I take a look at Bugzilla to figure out what has been fixed and what is new. Here's how I do it:

  1. Browse to the BugZilla keywords description page (the link to this page is also available on the advanced search form).
  2. Look for the "fixed[versionNumberHere]" and "verified[versionNumberHere]" keywords. Note that the [versionNumberHere] bit refers to the Gecko version number, not the Firefox version number. For example, Firefox 2.0.0.5 uses Gecko version 1.8.1.5 (as you might guess, the 2.0 release used 1.8.1). Firefox 3 will use Gecko 1.9.
  3. Out to the right of each keyword, you should see a count of the total bugs that particular keyword corresponds to. Click that number, and you will see all of the bugs that use the specified keyword.

Here are the fixed bugs and verified bugs for 2.0.0.5. If you really want to get clever, you can combine these keywords together (separated by a comma) on the advanced BugZilla search page. You'll need to tweak some of the default settings on that form to get it to work, but it can be done (as this query for Firefox 1.5.0.5 indicates).

There are two special notes about doing things this way:

  1. These queries are looking at fixes in the Gecko engine. As such, bug fixes for Thunderbird and Seamonkey will also show up.
  2. You may not see everything, particularly high-risk security fixes. For all security changes, see the known vulnerabilities page.

4 Comments

kip

5:45 PM on Jul 18, 2007
Looks like they haven't fixed the bug that gives me the most grief... Since I'm at work, I have to enter a password for my proxy to get to the external network, so I store that password (and several others) and I use a master password. So the first time I load an external page I have to enter my master password, and after that I don't any more. However, if a session crashes and you re-launch Firefox, and choose the option to restore session (which reopens all tabs that were open when you crashed), you get prompted for the master password for every tab that requires a password (instead of once per session). Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm describing it here, I've voted for it on Bugzilla so I guess that's about all I can do for now. If anyone reading this wants to give it a vote it might help me out: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356097 Or if anyone wants to go out and fix it (hey it's open source right) that'd be really super. I'm not motivated enough to learn the code base to fix something that only affects me maybe once a week.

Jonah

6:52 PM on Jul 18, 2007
How does Firefox crash for you? It's the rare edge case (some Java applet or multimedia content) that causes a crash for me, and I rarely see it. I've added a vote for the bug, by the way. Maybe this is the kind of thing that will get fixed in FF3 (though it doesn't show any progress, which isn't encouraging). There are a number of improvements coming for the password management stuff.

kip

2:17 PM on Jul 19, 2007
It crashes for me when I use an internal web app that uses a java applet and is probably not very well written. If I could consistently reproduce the crash I might report that, but I can't. Actually it doesn't technically crash, but it gets into some weird state where most of the interface doesn't respond. I can switch between open Firefox windows just fine, and I can minimize them and maximize them and still see the contents (i.e. it's still doing the screen painting code). But I can't launch new Firefox windows, and I can't switch between tabs, and the animating icon that indicates a tab is loading gets frozen, and I can't click on any links or bookmarks, and the menu bar doesn't respond. The close button responds, and even asks me if I'm sure I want to close with multiple tabs open, but there is still a firefox.exe program running in the task manager, which I have to kill if I want to be able to use it again. I'm sure it doesn't affect many people besides me. It's compounded by the fact that I have to use the app in the mornings, but that's also when I open all my news posts from my RSS feeds in new tabs, so I'll often have 5-10 external pages open when I restart. In the bug report it also says this can be reproduced if you have multiple home pages. Also, the pipelining tweak that you mentioned on my blog last month seems to have helped pages load faster behind my proxy!

Jonah

3:12 PM on Jul 19, 2007
The CMVC documentation here at IBM has a Java applet embedded in it that causes Firefox to crash for me. Java and Firefox never seem to work together nicely...

Leave a Comment

Ignore this field:
Never displayed
Leave this blank:
Optional; will not be indexed
Ignore this field:
Both Markdown and a limited set of HTML tags are supported
Leave this empty: