Mozilla snuck a couple of Firefox releases past me again. I only noticed version 48.0.1 when Firefox offered to upgrade itself on one of my computers. On a different computer, Firefox offered to upgrade itself directly to 48.0.2. I’m currently unable to induce Firefox to update itself to 48.0.2 on the former; the About dialog insists that “Firefox is up to date.”

Come on, Mozilla. Get your crap together:

• Provide proper release announcements. I’ve been harping on this for a while, but Mozilla is oddly resistant.
• Clarify update availability: why do I see update alerts on some computers, but not others?
• Add a manual update checker to the About dialog (menu > question icon > About), because otherwise it may not show the most recent version for several days after that version becomes available.

This is basic stuff, folks.

Firefox 48.0.1 was released on August 18. It’s mostly fixes for crashing problems, and doesn’t seem to include any security fixes.

Firefox 48.0.2 was released on August 24. It fixes one specific crashing problem.

Since neither of these updates include security fixes, delaying their installation (for whatever reason) isn’t going to make your computer less safe.

Update 2016Sep03: On my Windows 8.1 computer, Firefox didn’t prompt me to upgrade to version 48.0.2 until a week after the update became available. That seems an excessive delay. Of course, 48.0.2 isn’t a security release, so it’s not really urgent. Or is it? The 48.0.2 update message says “A security and stability update for Firefox is available.” Which seems weird, since the release notes don’t mention anything about security. The update message also says this: “It is strongly recommended that you apply this update for Firefox as soon as possible.” That would make sense if this was a security update, but again, it’s not. And how much sense does it make to tell people to update ASAP, when the message doesn’t appear until a week after the update becomes available? Sheesh.