Mozilla has announced that Firefox 33.0.3 has been officially released and is now available for download. It's just a maintenance version, but users should still upgrade.

Each Firefox branch gets a few point updates and they are usually about fixes and smaller changes that need to be implemented as soon as possible. This is rather common and most users don't even know that their application has been updated. Nonetheless, if you don't normally perform regular updates, this is a good time to do it.

Firefox uses a feature called Off Main Thread Compositing, which helps with the performance optimization of the browser. Unfortunately, not all of the drivers support Off Main Thread Compositing (OMTC), so the developers from Mozilla have blacklisted the graphics drivers that were causing problems. Also, a couple of startup crashes that also happened due to some problems with the drivers have been corrected as well.

Most of the Linux distributions will feature the new version of Firefox soon in their repositories. Until then, you can download Mozilla Firefox 33.0.3 from Softpedia. You can either compile it yourself or you can run it as a portable binary. More point releases are expected to arrive in the near future.