[German]Mozilla's developers have just released (February 18, 2020) version 73.0 .1 of the Firefox browser. This is a maintenance update for the browser that fixes the conflict with 0patch agents.
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The 0patch issue
I had the topic on my agenda for a few days because it concerned myself, but I have not yet got around to preparing it. There were several reader hints by mail or in the German comments here and (very cryptic here).
The problem: On my system I had installed the 0patch agent for testing. Later I faced the problem, that the Firefox browser won't work anymore – the browser could get started in version 72.x, but I was not able to access web pages anymore.
Unfortunately, the time between installing 0patch and finding that Firefox was causing problems was too far apart. I also covered at that time the Internet Explorer 0-day exploit story and tried the workaround recommended by Microsoft, which disables jscript.dll. As a result, I could not establish a association between the Firefox error and the 0patch installation.
When updating to Firefox 73 I found that it crashed immediately, but could not find anything when searching the web. At some point I uninstalled the 0patch agent and later reinstalled Firefox 73 on my system as a portable application. And suddenly the browser was running again.
One day later I came across this explanation by Mitja Kolsek, who explains the technical background of the problem. Mitja also provided a workaround on how to fix the collision between 0patch agents and Firefox that caused the malfunction. I had pointed out the issue in comments like here to German readers. But this workaround is now superfluous, since Firefox in version 73.0.1 has solved the problem.
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Firefox 73.0.1 fixes
Blog reader Ralf pointed out in this German comment (thanks for that) the update to Firefox 73.0.1. Also this comment from EP on the topic informed me about the update (thanks also). In the release notes the following bug fixes are listed:
- Fixed crashes on Windows systems running third-party security software such as 0patch or G DATA (bug 1610790)
- Fixed loss of browser functionality in certain circumstances such as running in Windows compatibility mode or having custom anti-exploit settings (bug 1614885)
- Resolved problems connecting to the RBC Royal Bank website (bug 1613943)
- Fixed Firefox unexpectedly exiting when leaving Print Preview mode (bug 1611133)
- Fixed crashes when playing encrypted content on some Linux systems (bug 1614535)
I had written above something about the 0patch problem. The update also fixes an issue, when using the G-DATA virus protection solution, that the Firefox browser was no longer usable.
You can download the new Firefox for different platforms here. Alternatively you can download the browser via FTP.
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