Mozilla released a new version of the
Firefox Web browser that corrects a critical security
vulnerability discovered earlier this week.
Mozilla said Firefox 3.5.1, released late Thursday, fixes what the organization describes as "several security issues" and "several stability issues" that have been discovered since the debut of Firefox 3.5 June 30.
While Firefox 3.5 has been winning accolades for its new features and functionality, it's also been roundly criticized for being "buggy." Users complained of slow load times, crashes caused by the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and other headaches and called for a quick turnaround on an updated release.
But the need for an update became more urgent on Tuesday when security vulnerability intelligence company Secunia reported finding a bug in Firefox 3.5 that it classified as highly critical. Secunia said hackers could exploit the flaw by executing arbitrary code to take over a user's computer.
Secunia said the flaw was caused by an error in the just-in-time compiler that can be exploited to cause a memory corruption.
In the release notes for Firefox 3.5.1, Mozilla said it fixed several security issues, rated from low to critical, including the vulnerability discovered this week. Mozilla said it also fixed several stability issues and a problem that was causing the browser to take a long time to load on some Windows systems. Mozilla posted a complete list of the changes on its Web site.
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