Last Firefox Update Was Because of Farmville

Mozilla rolls out Firefox update to remedy FarmVille issue.

Mozilla rolled a pretty big update for Firefox at the end of last week. However, the company rolled out another update right after. It was a teeny, tiny, update that fixed just one problem (adding an increase hang detector timeout) and it looks like the reason for the update was FarmVille.

Gamasutra reports that Mozilla rolled out v3.6.6 because the previous update was causing problems in the wildly popular social-networking game, FarmVille. Some FarmVille users were complaining that Firefox v3.6.4 "hangs the browser long enough for [a] timeout to trigger and kill it". It seems the issue stems from Firefox's new feature that terminates Flash if it is not responsive. However, because the likes of FarmVille and MafiaWars take longer to load, unnecessarily triggering this hang protection feature.

So, the latest version of Firefox has been updated to include an interim solution that increases the timeout, as developers look for a more ideal fix.

Mozilla's Justin Dolske posted the following on Bugzilla:

"… now that 3.6.4 has shipped, we are seeing an increasing number of reports that some users are unable to play Farmville, because Farmville hangs the browser long enough for out timeout to trigger and kill it.  As an interm solution, we can increase the timeout and then look for a better solution. The SUMO article suggests that 30 seconds is a good value, so let's hit this with a big hammer and make it 45s."

Though FarmVille is mentioned specifically, a comment from Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox at Mozilla, revealed the problem wasn't isolated to FarmVille. That said, it appears the surge in complaints from FarmVille users is what finally pushed Mozilla to release a temporary solution.