The new update for Firefox which rolled out today, is already causing problems. We noticed here at Bloom Media that the commonly used “View Source” feature caused the browser to crash. It doesn’t seem to matter what page you are trying to view, the browser will crash regardless.

This seems to be linked to the “Web Developer” add-on for Firefox, if you uninstall the add-on, the problem goes away. We have tested this with Web Developer 1.1.6 in FireFox 3.0.9. Other versions may not have this problem.

UPDATE :  I received an e-mail from the author of Web Developer : Chris Pederick.  It seems that although we found that removing the Web Developer add-on solved the issue, the fault actually lies with the HTML Validator add-on.    You will all be glad to know that an update for HTML Validator was pushed out this morning : Version 0.8.5.2.

HTML Validator Update 0.8.5.2

This is a statement from the author

- Previous versions hit a bug of FIREFOX 3.0.9 in DOM API ! The real solution is Firefox 3.0.10 but it will not be available before 1 month.  Practically, you do view source in Firefox 3.0.9 then crash ! Some lines of code that were working since Firefox 1.0 are now crashing Firefox… Due to this, I have to release very fast 0.856 to work-around the Firefox 3.0.9 bug So, the highlight of the lines with HTML errors is now disabled ! Unhapilly, I had no better solution.