Good news: there have been more developments with Mozilla as they work on the rather serious bug (the one where you can’t read a damn thing) in Firefox 4 Beta.
John Daggett at Mozilla created logging to help identify the problem, and I ran the latest nightly build to get the logs back to him. We’ve identified the troublesome area. Another expert, Jonathan Kew, today identified what caused the break and has created a patch.
I’m glad this finally got to the attention of the people that matter. Once it did, the fixes are proceeding apace. I have to admit it took a while, and the initial filings of the bug seemed to have been ignored, but once it got into the system after Boris asked me to cc him, the Firefox initiés are trying to make the next incarnation of the browser top-notch.
I believe it took reporting it to both Mozilla Support and Bugzilla before it got noticed—that’s the strategy I’ll take in future if there’s a bug of this nature.
I also kept the buggy Beta installed, so I could help with troubleshooting.
For once, I’m looking forward to the next Firefox Beta with optimism. It might even be worth holding on to till the final release.