As has become habitual, Mozilla has released a crash fixing update to their browser Firefox 17.0.1. Two issues which caused sluggish performance or actual crash on some Windows machines have been fixed.
Released about 9 days back Firefox 17 had trouble rendering some fonts and User Agent string. Of them, the case of the User Agent string is silly but sullied the Firefox name.
The Browser Agent is a browser’s ID; a line of code which the browser gives to a website so that site can handle, treat it appropriately. Over the years, websites have learned the syntax used in such User Agent strings by various browsers.
Before Firefox 17, the Mozilla browser used to identify itself (among other things) with its Gecko Engine build date (which itself has not been updated for almost 2 years now). In Firefox 17, Mozilla changed the string from stating build *date* to build *version*.
From my machine, this is how the old UA (before Firefox 17) used to look:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0.8) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.8
In Firefox 17 this was the UA:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.
Note the change from Gecko/20100101 to Gecko/17.0, which reportedly created problems and crashes with many websites. To tell the truth, it is not the fault of Mozilla, but the fault of website designers. But the blame, as can only be expected, lands on Firefox. Everyone, including me, shouted about Firefox Crashes.
The problem seems to be real as even a humble site like mine has had few dozen hits searching for ‘firefox crash’.
:-D
To sort out the problem Mozilla have partially reverted the UA string on Firefox 17.0.1. This is how it looks in Firefox 17.0.1. They reverted from the Gecko Engine *version* to the old *date*.
You can read the release notes at:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/17.0.1/releasenotes/
Go Ahead, update to Firefox 17.0.1 for a crash free browsing experience.
Released about 9 days back Firefox 17 had trouble rendering some fonts and User Agent string. Of them, the case of the User Agent string is silly but sullied the Firefox name.
The Browser Agent is a browser’s ID; a line of code which the browser gives to a website so that site can handle, treat it appropriately. Over the years, websites have learned the syntax used in such User Agent strings by various browsers.
Before Firefox 17, the Mozilla browser used to identify itself (among other things) with its Gecko Engine build date (which itself has not been updated for almost 2 years now). In Firefox 17, Mozilla changed the string from stating build *date* to build *version*.
From my machine, this is how the old UA (before Firefox 17) used to look:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0.8) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.8
In Firefox 17 this was the UA:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.
Note the change from Gecko/20100101 to Gecko/17.0, which reportedly created problems and crashes with many websites. To tell the truth, it is not the fault of Mozilla, but the fault of website designers. But the blame, as can only be expected, lands on Firefox. Everyone, including me, shouted about Firefox Crashes.
The problem seems to be real as even a humble site like mine has had few dozen hits searching for ‘firefox crash’.
:-D
To sort out the problem Mozilla have partially reverted the UA string on Firefox 17.0.1. This is how it looks in Firefox 17.0.1. They reverted from the Gecko Engine *version* to the old *date*.
You can read the release notes at:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/17.0.1/releasenotes/
Go Ahead, update to Firefox 17.0.1 for a crash free browsing experience.
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