Mozilla has recently shipped Firefox 73.0 with two new accessibility features, the update has caused the browser to crash on startup for the users with third-party software such as 0patch and G Data Internet Security 2020 installed. The applications trying to inject their dlls into Firefox launcher process caused the browser to crash, the issue has been addressed by Mozilla with “Firefox 73.0.1” which is planned to release today on February 18, 2020, with other crucial fixes.
Here is what happened:
When Firefox 73 was released Mozilla mentioned in the version release notes under “unresolved” that users may encounter a startup crash with 0Patch, the company confirmed this will be addressed in a future release and suggested users add Firefox executable to 0patch settings. The issue has been marked as WontFix on Mozilla’s end.
Similarly, another security product troubled Firefox users: Exploit protection in G Data Protection has made navigating to websites impossible in the Firefox browser.
Some users who have run Firefox on Windows 10 in “Windows 7 compatibility mode” experienced issues where the browser is unable to load content for websites in the browser. Though this looked somewhat similar to the issue caused by G Data, this is a different problem where Firefox launches with zero content processes (default 8), which means no functionality. Mozilla has included fixes for these three issues along with other discovered bugs in 73.0.1 update.
Firefox 73.0.1 release notes
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 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)
You can check Firefox version 73.0.1 release notes here (currently not live).
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