Firefox 3.5.8: New patches help keep older browser safe

Stephen Withers
Friday, 19 February 2010 15:27

Business IT - Open Source

Although Firefox 3.6 is considered the go, updates are still being produced for the 3.5 line. The latest release is Firefox 3.5.8.

It's not immediately obvious why anybody would insist on sticking to Firefox 3.5.x, as the system requirements for 3.5 and 3.6 are practically identical unless you're running Linux, and doing your own testing of 3.5.8 would probably be as time consuming as testing 3.6.

Anyway, Mozilla committed to the provision of security and stability upgrades to 3.5.x until August 2010. Accordingly, Firefox 3.5.8 delivers the same security patches that were delivered in version 3.6, which was released last month.

There are two critical patches: one concerning the HTML parser, the other for JavaScript (more specifically, in the implementation of Web Workers). A high impact change fixes multiple bugs in the browser engine that could potentially be exploited to run arbitrary code. There are also a pair of moderate impact patches to address cross-site scripting concerns.

Multiple stability fixes are also delivered in Firefox 3.5.8.

The popular open source browser is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.