Apparently, Mozilla has stopped Firefox 66 Update to users due to a major issue with PowerPoint where the text or data typed in it won’t be saved, it continues to disappear. The company is trying to fix the issue for current Fx 66 users via Normandy by changing a preference value and then they can able to unthrottle the update to 100%. At the moment, Mozilla is currently trying the land the fix for the issue in Nightly and beta channels.
Mozilla pulls Firefox 66 Update
What happened?
If you now visit PowerPoint Online in Firefox 66 and try to type something for the title or subtitle box, the text keeps vanishing automatically as you type, we’re able to reproduce this.
The issue can be fixed by changing the preference dom.keyboardevent.keypress.hack.use_legacy_keycode_and_charcode value to powerpoint.officeapps.live.com
You can then reload the PowerPoint tab for change take effect. We’ve tested this and it worked where typed data not lost after typing.
Now in these situations without releasing an update, Mozilla uses Normandy to change the preference value for targetted users.
Mozilla at the moment not sure whether the issue is with PowerPoint only or with other office domains also. First, they want to fix the issue for PowerPoint through Normandy, as they fear changing the preference for other domains may break other Office sites in the latest Firefox browser.
Here is the issue reported: “Any computer upgraded to Firefox 66 (latest) (Mac or PC) if you log into Office 365 and use PowerPoint the text in the boxes automatically vanishes after typing. You can not add any text to text boxes.”
At the moment, the issue severity set to major and Priority given as P1, expect the company to fix this issue quickly and resume Firefox 66 update.
This is what Mozilla Senior Release Manager, Lin Henry said ” Taking with Adam, Benson, and Dennis now, what I’d like to use if we can do it quickly, is ship this fix via Normandy with Just PowerPoint Domain (since we have no evidence of other sites breaking). If we can do that tomorrow, then we will be clear to unthrottle the 66 release channel and ship it to 100% of the release channel”.
Mozilla stopped previous Firefox 65 update also due to Avast breaking https websites, later, it resumed the update once Avast fixed the issue on their end. Now, are you affected?
Update March 23, 2019: The company has fixed the issue in release and Nightly versions, expect them to push Firefox 66 update to remaining users as well.
