Firefox 94.0.2: first Microsoft Store-specific update, released for all platforms
Mozilla Firefox 94.0.2 will be released today. The new version of Firefox addresses a single issue in the Microsoft Store version of Firefox. While that is the case, it is released on all platforms, including Linux, Mac and Windows.
The Microsoft Store version of Firefox updates automatically through the store itself. Non-Store versions of Firefox will receive the update automatically as well. There is no rush to install it unless Firefox was installed via the Microsoft Store.
Mozilla launched Firefox on Microsoft's new Store, which welcomes regular desktop applications now, recently. The Store is available natively on Windows 11; Microsoft started to roll out the new Store for Windows 10 as well.
Back to Firefox 94.0.2. The release notes list a single issue that is fixed in the new Firefox update.
Improved hangs experienced by users of assistive technology such as NVDA when installing Firefox through the Microsoft Store
The linked bug report on Bugzilla@Mozilla provides additional details on the issue. It was opened a month ago:
E10s a11y depends on a COM component (AccessibleHandler.dll) which has to be registered in the registry. Without this component, a11y will work, but it will be unusably slow, possibly unreliable and OOP iframes won't work with the JAWS screen reader.
The issue is caused by a missing component, which causes responsiveness to be very poor in the beginning when using assistive technologies such as NVDA screen reader in the Firefox version for Microsoft Store.
The issue will be fixed later on with the release of Firefox 94.0.2. Mozilla is reworking the entire system to remove dependencies, but it is not ready yet for release.
Firefox users on other platforms should feel no rush to install the new Firefox 94.0.2 release immediately, since it is addressing a Microsoft Store specific issue.
Closing Words
The fix is important for users of assistive technologies if the Microsoft Store version of the browser is used. It makes sense to release the update as a patch instead of waiting for the December release of Firefox 95.
> As the article states it, “The fix is important for users of assistive technologies if the Microsoft Store version of the browser” so personally I’m not concerned.
As I already mentioned: There are more fixes than just this one, including two fixed crashes. In total I count 24 commits for Firefox 94.0.2 and not only the one change that was mentioned in this article.
Also, archive.mozilla.org is not relevant at all. Providing it on this archive is part of the release process but that is still ongoing. The release won’t be before Monday, as I said. As long as there is neither a download via the website nor an in-app update it means that the new version is not yet released and that’s important: People who think they are super smart and download a version before the release from archive.mozilla.org often download incomplete version. Firefox 94.0.2 is a great example because the last crash fix (and that crash affects a few more people) was added in a second build of Firefox 94.0.2 that did not yet exist a few hours ago.
They should not surreptitiously pull a tarball and then change it without bumping anything. Maybe Windows developers do things like that, but we don’t. That tarball should never have been in the pub/firefox/releases directory if it wasn’t a release, or it should have been bumped to 94.0.2.1 or something after the fact.
That said, yes, I rebuilt it. I needed to test upgraded toolchains anyway since that build.
@Tom, thanks for the clarification, most appreciated.
I had no idea that archive.mozilla.org is not relevant at all. It being “part of the release process” yet “As long as there is neither a download via the website nor an in-app update it means that the new version is not yet released” : not yet released but available on archive.mozilla.org: hard to conceptualize the inner-logic. No need to feel or be super-smart to proceed with confidence for a download from a Mozilla server, but perhaps initiation to a company’s very personal logic makes a difference.
We”ll wait for Monday and see what https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/94.0.2/releasenotes/ has to say about it (at this time they’re “still preparing the notes for this release, and will post them here when they are ready.” which corroborates the hiatus with its availability on archive.mozilla.org, even if a new version’s release notes happens to take its time to be published.
I did a build yesterday without waiting for release notes or anything and now, today, it’s as if the 94.0.2 release has never happened. The 94.0.2 subdir is not even there in the /releases/ directory on http://ftp.mozilla.org anymore.
Firefox 94.0.2 is available nevertheless at https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
As the article states it, “The fix is important for users of assistive technologies if the Microsoft Store version of the browser” so personally I’m not concerned.
Firefox 94.0.2 is planned for Monday (I don’t know why Martin wrote it was planned for last Thursday). By the way, since you did your build another bugfix was added to 94.0.2.
Well, this is not the only change of Firefox 94.0.2. But the main thing seems to be that this website was the first website that wrote about a not yet released update…
94.0.1 was also released for all platforms, there was a fix that affects only macOS.
It is just automatically built for all platforms.
LineageOS updates are built in the same way – weekly, even if there were no changes at all.