Firefox patched up

FIREFOX 3 HAS BEEN patched up again today as Mozilla announced its developers have fixed no less than 12 security vulnerabilities, four of which were considered critical.

A Mozzarella security advisory said its new Firefox 3.0.9 - the third Firefox update this year - has dealt with a number of stability bugs, including some which caused memory corruption and which unsavoury hacker types could have used to attack users with malicious code.

Two especially critical problems were purportedly fixed in the browser engine itself, as well as another couple of glitches in Firefox's JavaScript engine.

Mozilla seems to be lagging a bit behind schedule for the release of its new "Shiretoko" version of Firefox, which initially was to have been dubbed version 3.1. That had been slated for release early this year, but now the organization will shortly be releasing a fourth beta of what it has renamed Firefox 3.5.

Version 3.5 will purportedly go some way towards faster execution of web-based JavaScript applications, bring users a 'private browsing mode', provide a way to avoid having to install flash plugins, offer native support for playing open standards based audio and video media files, and add native support for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) applications.

Updates are available here µ