Firefox 18 is now available [LWN.net]

Firefox 18 is now available

Posted Jan 9, 2013 14:39 UTC (Wed) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
Parent article: Firefox 18 is now available

It should be noted that this is the first version whose binaries do not run on Kubuntu Hardy and Debian Lenny and possibly Squeeze any more, due to reliance on pretty recent GNU libc features. There’s currently an open bug about this, but the 17 ESR series continues to work for now (although 17.0.2 builds before 3 were also broken).

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Firefox 18 is now available

Posted Jan 10, 2013 10:14 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

"newer feature" is overstatement. Most likely this is the result of the old tempest: when GLibC developers changed memcpy to copy things from the end (it's faster on some CPUs for some obscure reasons) they found out that it broke few programs (Flash is the most important one).

Programs are incorrect (since memcpy was never promised to be usable with overlapping src and dst), but they are popular and that's why GLibC 2.14 has two versions of memcpy: memcpy@GLIBC2.2 and memcpy@GLIBC2.14. This basically means that more-or-less any program compiled with GLibC 2.14 is not usable with older versions of GLibC. Note that this difference only exist in x86-64 version of GLibC, 32-bit version does not have new optimized memcpy!

Firefox 18 is now available

Posted Jan 10, 2013 19:42 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

I don’t think it was that (but considering http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=ae12497b nothing in that source code surprises me any more; IMHO they should’ve thrown away the old Netscape code and started anew).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723487 is the bugreport.