Another stealth release from our friends at Mozilla, Firefox 38.0 fixes at least thirteen security issues.

Other changes in this release include tab-based preferences, as well as HTML5 enhancements and improvements to developer tools.

If you’re tired of waiting for Mozilla to issue proper release announcements, you can always get your Firefox news from another source, like the CERT alerts blog.

Update 2015May14: Two days later, and Firefox still isn’t updating itself. I’m not sure if there’s a problem with Mozilla’s update process, or if it’s just sluggish. According to Mozilla:

By default, Firefox is set to automatically update itself but you can always do a manual update. Here’s how:
1. Click the menu button, click help (question mark icon) and select About Firefox.
2. The About Firefox window will open and Firefox will begin checking for updates and downloading them automatically.

What I’m finding is that while the About box may be checking for updates, it’s not finding one, or in any case even if it finds one, it’s not downloading anything. It just says ‘Firefox is up to date’.

In any case, since this release contains fixes for security issues, I’m going to install it manually from the main download page. That page correctly identifies that I’m running an older version and offers a link to download the new version.

Update 2015May14: Via the official #firefox IRC channel, I was just informed that once again, a new version of Firefox is causing crashing problems. Version 38.0 has been pulled from release, and we can expect a fixed version 38.0.1 later this week.