03.27.08
Here we go again (or, odd-numbered betas hate us)
You might have noticed that Camino 1.6 Beta 4 has just made an appearance, only two days after 1.6 Beta 3. In what seems to be a unpleasant case of history repeating itself, there was a fairly commonly-hit crash in 1.6 Beta 3, so we decided this morning to release a Beta 4 to make the beta experience as pleasant as possible.
I don’t remember much about the Camino 1.0 betas (it seems like ages ago!), so they were probably mostly “major crash”-free. Many of you will recall, though, that Camino 1.5’s sole beta was particularly plagued by a random crash, and while we did urge everyone to move to a new build, we didn’t release a new beta (which, in hindsight, we should have done). More recently, Camino 1.6 Beta 1 had not even officially been released when we replaced it with Beta 2 due to a just-fixed Core crash. Thanks to software update, it’s much easier to release a new version and ensure everyone gets notified and upgraded in a timely fashion, though we don’t want to do so too often and induce “update fatigue” among our users.
Yesterday a user reported a crash when clicking on a <select> during pageload, and although I couldn’t reproduce the crash and hadn’t seen it in my testing and use of Beta 3, his crash log was plausible. However, Stuart Morgan was finally able to reproduce the crash on one of his Macs, and he worked up a fix right away. When early reports indicated that a large number of users could be hitting this crash, we decided earlier today that we should release a Beta 4 to fix that crash (and another, much less common, crash that Stuart had also fixed on Wednesday). As far as we can tell, the Beta 4 release has gone a bit better (no crashes in Talkback yet!)—knock on wood—and it seems that I managed not to flub any of the website changes this time around, too. 
Thanks go again to Stuart Morgan for the bug-fixing, Mark Mentovai for the build-wrangling, and Mozilla Corp’s Nick Thomas for getting us in Bouncer right away.
Special thanks to everyone who reported this crash, either in Bugzilla, the forum, or in via Talkback (for those using PPC Macs), and we apologize to everyone for the inconvenience. (And I hope this is the last release I write about before Camino 1.6 ✈ itself!)