[German]On December 3, 2019 Mozilla’s developers released the next major version 71 as well as the 68.3esr of the Firefox browser. The update does not work for all users. Some users are claiming damaged/deleted profiles and lost addons. Here is a short overview of the known issues.
I am planning to deploy Firefox 68.0.1ESR using SCCM but I noticed that I am not able to disable automatic updates anymore. I am using mozilla.cfg file with following settings (which have worked just fine with older FF versions). Firefox Release July 9, 2019 Version 68.0, first offered to Release channel users on July 9, 2019 Today, we release two versions of Firefox 68 — a rapid release as well as an Extended Support Release (ESR).
In the blog post Firefox 71 and 68.3.0esr released I mentioned the new versions for the Firefox browser and the changes. The update to Firefox 71 portable (32 bit) worked fine for me – I could not find any errors during a quick test. But shortly after the publication of the article I got the first feedback about issues from my German blog readers. I’ll compil it here together – maybe there’s some feedback, if these are just single cases or if there are bigger problems.
Firefox 68.3esr: Profile damaged during upgrade
Some users have experienced issues during upgrade with Firefox ESR. There are reports, that user profile is corrupted or missing, when upgrading to version 68.3. German blog reader Andy writes here:
Hmm, within the company the default profile of the 68.3 ESR was damaged after upgrade. There was a message with “new profile format” and then everything was broken. Using Firefox.exe -P I was able to restore the old profile, so half as bad. I will roll it out during operation but definitely not :-(
German blog reader deoroller noticed, that the policies.json file was gone after upgrading to the new Firefox 68.3esr.
After the update, the distribution folder with policies.json was gone.
I’m not sure, if it’s related to Firefox 68.3esr or Firefox 71 (but I got an additional comment, that also Firefox 71 has the same issue). Also German blog reader reported a lost file policies.json and missing addons.
Great, Mozilla,
Profile bricked, addons gone, and policies.json no longer found.
The portable version is affected to the same extent
Luckily I did a test before rolling out
I haven’t found anything on the Internet yet in a quick search. Is there anyone else affected by corrupted profiles or missing addons?
Firefox 68 Espanol
Picture-in-picture feature with memory issue
New on Firefox 71 is the picture-in-picture function for video playback. Blog reader MrX1980 points out in this comment that there is still a memory problem there.
Firefox 68 Esr
The picture-in-picture (PiP) function in conjunction with WebRender has another memory problem that is currently being investigated. The consumption of GPU memory and memory is constantly increasing when PiP is used and the Firefox window is minimized. Sometimes OOM (Out of Memory) crashes occur.
(Memory leak in Firefox Picture-in-Picture feature, Click to zoom)
Firefox 68+
The bug has already been listed in the bug tracker in this entry. I tried it under Windows 7 – in the resource monitor the privately used memory slowly increases (the GPU consumption is not displayed there). If further problems become known, I’ll add them here.
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Firefox 71 and 68.3.0esr released
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