Mozilla was forced to halt the rollout of Firefox 78 after some users reported experiencing a serious bug after installing the latest version of the browser.
According to the official bug report, users noticed that Firefox 78 was missing all search engines as well as its list of one-click search engines. Auto-complete was also broken in the address bar and searching from the start page did not launch a search.
Firefox Stable and Extended Support Release (ESR) were also affected by the bug when updated to the new version though new installations of Firefox are not.
As reported by Ghacks, Mozilla engineers discovered that the issue was caused by a local IndexedDB database that was not working properly. After investigating further, the engineers found that the search engine of Firefox was switched to using “remote settings” in the new release and that it relied on Indexed DB to function properly.
Firefox 78.0.1
Following its botched release of Firefox 78, a newer version of the browser named Firefox 78.0.1 is now available to download on Mozilla’s website.
The latest version of Mozilla’s browser adds the Protections Dashboard which provides users with consolidated reports about tracking protection, data breaches and password management. Users can now see if any of their saved passwords have been exposed in a data breach as well as track the number of breaches that have have been resolved right from the dashboard.
Firefox 78 also fixed an issue in which screen savers would interrupt WebRTC calls in the browser and this means that the new release will offer improved video calling. At the same time, Mozilla has finally executed its plan to drop support for the legacy protocols TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 after putting it on hold back in March due to the pandemic. Now when Firefox users visit a site that doesn’t support TLS 1.2, they’ll see an error page
Firefox 78 is the last major release of the browser that includes support for macOS versions 10.9, 10.10 and 10.11. The release also addresses seven high-severity security flaws, four medium-severity flaws, two low-severity flaws and a set of high-severity memory safety flaws.
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Via ZDNet