Firefox 11 auto update delayed for Microsoft’s ‘Patch Tuesday,’ manual download later today

The newest version of Mozilla’s popular web browser, Firefox 11, was scheduled to come out today, precisely six weeks after the launch of version 10. However, the company has taken to its blog to announce that it will be holding back the update at least a day or two because today is “Patch Tuesday,” the day when Microsoft releases its latest Windows updates to machines. According to Mozilla, the company has had issues before with updates to Windows messing with new Firefox builds, so version 11 won’t get pushed out automatically until the company checks to make sure there are no problems. If you can’t wait for Mozilla to release the auto update, the company says it’ll make a manual download available later on today.

“Patch Tuesday” was originally only one of the reasons why Mozilla delayed the update: the company was also concerned about a security bug that ZDI had discovered in Firefox 11, but it turns out that the hole has already been taken care of. Firefox 11 itself is a minor update; the browser can now properly import bookmarks and settings from Google Chrome, and compatibility with Growl 1.3 has also been fixed. In addition, some CSS handling has been improved and you can now sync add-ons across computers.

Update: Firefox 11 is now available to download from Mozilla’s site.