Hot off the press comes the news that Mozilla is pushing out yet another Firefox update real soon now, Firefox 3.0.3 will be released as soon as possible to fix a rather serious bug in Firefox 3.0.2 which has not long been released itself. In fact, my 3.0.2 update was only pushed to me a couple of days ago, so it really is annoying to know it has added an unwanted bug into my browser.

The official explanation from Mozilla is that “shortly after releasing Firefox 3.0.2 our QA and Support teams began seeing reports of problems certain users were having with the Firefox Password Manager. This was being caused by non-ASCII data (in domains, logins or passwords) saved as something other than UTF-8 failing to convert back to Unicode (see bug 454708) which was a regression from a fix to make the Password Manager work on IDN sites with characters over U+0100.”

Which means that users with password data stores including non-ASCII characters that are saved as anything other than UTF-8 cannot, er, actually access them or create any new saved passwords for that matter.

“There is no permanent dataloss” Mozilla assures us, adding “the saved data is just inaccessible.”

Well that’s OK then. Not.

Mozilla admits that this represents a “significant regression” and so has triggered a fast-release Firefox 3.0.3 process to fix this single issue. Indeed, I am told that the fix has been landed and tested, and updates will be released on the beta channel by early next week with a full release to follow soon after.

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