Firefox 43.0.1

A single minor change seems to be the only reason for the Firefox 43.0.1 release yesterday. The release notes describe the change as preparation “to use SHA-256 signing certificate for Windows builds”. This does not appear to be a security-related change, so there’s no hurry to update.

Mozilla has improved the look of Firefox’s release notes pages, but there has been no functional improvement. For instance, while there is a link to the ‘complete list of changes‘, that link goes to the Bugzilla bug tracking system, which is not easy to parse for non-technical users. Worse, it shows all changes in Firefox 43, not just 43.0.1, and there’s no way to search for changes to 43.0.1 only.

As usual, there was no proper release announcement for this version. There wasn’t even a vaguely-corresponding post on the Mozilla blog.

On my test computer, when the Firefox 43.0.1 update finished installing, Firefox displayed a web page with a brief video and an underlying announcement, about Firefox 43’s new privacy features, and ‘new’ Pocket integration. Which seems weird, because Pocket integration was also announced for Firefox 38.0.5 in June.

In other Firefox-related news, Mozilla recently pointed to an announcement from Netflix in a blog post titled ‘Firefox Users Can Now Watch Netflix HTML5 Video on Windows‘. This is an important change, because it’s no longer necessary for Firefox users to install and use Flash to watch Netflix content.

About jrivett

Jeff Rivett has worked with and written about computers since the early 1980s. His first computer was an Apple II+, built by his father and heavily customized. Jeff's writing appeared in Computist Magazine in the 1980s, and he created and sold a game utility (Ultimaker 2, reviewed in the December 1983 Washington Apple Pi Journal) to international markets during the same period. Proceeds from writing, software sales, and contract programming gigs paid his way through university, earning him a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) degree at UWO. Jeff went on to work as a programmer, sysadmin, and manager in various industries. There's more on the About page, and on the Jeff Rivett Consulting site.

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