Firefox 8.0.1 Officially Available, What You Need To Know

You may remember that I published a news article on November 16 about the release of Firefox 8.0.1.

The release was available on Mozilla ftp servers and on third party sites like Softpedia, but not officially announced by Mozilla on the Firefox website. While that has not been a big problem in the past, with a few rare exceptions, it has been a issue this time.

The Firefox release was pulled from the Mozilla server and things went quite for a few days. Today, Mozilla has released Firefox 8.0.1 to the public.

What does that mean for users who have downloaded the previous version that was pulled? These users need to download Firefox 8.0.1 for their computer manually from Mozilla again and install it over the current version.

Firefox 8.0.1 fixes two issues. First a Mac OS X crash that can occur when a Java applet is loaded in the browser with Java JRE 6.29 installed, and second a startup crash on Windows that is caused by versions older than 7.6.2 of the popular RoboForm extension.

Firefox users who are not on a Mac with that particular version of Java or on Windows with one of the affected RoboForm extensions do not need to update the browser right away. While it certainly does no harm, it won't give them any benefit either (other than the reassurance that they are running the latest version of the browser).

Firefox users interested in the Firefox 8.0.1 release notes find them on this page. The internal updater should have picked up the new version by now. Users who already have version 8.0.1 installed should visit the download Firefox page to download the new release version manually for their language and operating system.

Update: Some users have reported that the new update is installed on systems where the pulled Firefox update has been installed. It appears that it may not be necessary to download the new version manually after all.

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