The GNOME developers have announced the general availability of a new maintenance release for the GNOME Shell component of the stable GNOME 3.18 desktop environment.

We reported last week that the second and last maintenance release of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment had been published, bringing updates to numerous core components and GNOME applications. Now, the GNOME devs are concentrating their efforts on implementing new features to the next major release, GNOME 3.20.

The fact of the matter is that GNOME 3.18.2 is already making its way into the software repositories of various GNU/Linux distributions, but it looks to us like the GNOME developers still need to fix many critical bugs that have been reported by users since a year ago.

Therefore, they've just released the 3.18.3 maintenance build for the most important component of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, the GNOME Shell graphical user interface, patching a crash in the gnome-shell browser plugin of the GNOME Shell package.

The gnome-shell browser plugin crashed WebKit

Looking at the release notes, it appears that two bugs have been fixed in GNOME Shell 3.18.3, and according to one of the bug reports, the GNOME Shell browser plugin crashed WebKit on the extensions.gnome.org website because the plugin used GLib types registered statically.

"The problem is that we are creating a new scriptable object for the plugin instance everytime NPPVpluginScriptableNPObject is requested," said Carlos Garcia Campos. "That confuses everything, the website uses only one of those to set the onchange listener, but all of them connect to the dbus signal, so it's very easy that the object handling the signal doesn't have the listener."

Therefore, we will take this opportunity to inform all users of the GNOME 3.18.2 desktop environment that they need to update the GNOME Shell packages in their GNU/Linux operating system to version 3.18.3 as soon as possible via the default software repositories of the respective distribution. Alternatively, you can download the GNOME Shell 3.18.3 sources right now from Softpedia and start compiling by hand.