BEIJING, June 12 (Xinhuanet) -- Mozilla.org has been forced by Apple to release yet another release candidate of its next-generation Firefox 3 browser.

    Firefox 3.0 RC 3, released on Wednesday for all operating systems, offers a single bug fix, a workaround for a bug introduced in the Apple's latest Mac OS X 10.5.3 update, released a few weeks ago.

    First noted by MacNN, the bug, which causes some systems to hang or crash at start-up or shutdown, has been tracked to changes Apple made to "VerifiedDownloadPlugin" in Mac OS X 10.5.3.

    The company also announced Wednesday that the final edition of Firefox 3.0 will be officially released next Tuesday, June 17.

    Reports said that Mozilla developers reported the problem to Apple and that the company's engineers replied with tacit acknowledgement of the issue: "After further investigation, it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering."

    The open-source team, however, decided to workaround the bug, rather than wait for an official fix from Apple, which is traditionally very mum about bugs, security issues, and other internal development issues.

    Users on the Mozilla's bug tracking system said that the bug was still present in early (private) developer builds of Mac OS X 10.4.

    "Anything we do in our application will be a work-around; any real fix has to come from Apple, on their timeline," Mike Shaver, Mozilla's chief evangelist, noted in a message Tuesday on the Bugzilla thread discussing the patch, according to the publication.

    Shaver said he created a workaround that prevented "VerifiedDownloadPlugin" from loading to mimic the Safari behavior, as reports indicated that Safari does not load the plugin. His workaround was added to the Firefox code Tuesday, the reports said.

    (Agencies)