Browser bonanza: all five major browsers updated or patched

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 18 December 2008 04:03

IT Industry - Development

Camino 1.6.6 uses the Gecko rendering engine that is part of Firefox, so it gains the same security and stability improvements.

The Camino developers have also incorporated Flashblock 1.5.7 for improved blocking of Flash animations. Ad blocking has also been improved.

Camino 1.6.6 requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.

Opera 9.63 incorporates fixes for seven security issues, including three that could allow the execution of arbitrary code, two that could reveal data, and one involving cross site scripting.

In addition, Opera can now import .p12 private certificates.

Non-security changes include the option of closing tabs by double-clicking them, the addition of a Thread button and the removal of the Label button from the mail toolbar, the reversion of the Subject field to its previous behavior as a text field and not a button, and new shortcuts for follow, ignore and go to thread.

Opera 9.63 requires Windows 95 or later, or Mac OS X 10.3 or later. It is also available for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. Older versions are still available for QNX, OS/2 and BeOS.

Safari for Mac received some minor improvements through this week's Mac OS X updates. Mac OS X 10.5.6 was said by Apple to improve Safari's compatibility with web proxy servers.

Other changes in Mac OS X 10.5.6 and Security Update 2008-008 improve Safari security by performing additional validation of domain names to avoid session fixation attacks. 10.5.6 also extends Download Validation to provide a warning when first opening a downloaded file with executable permissions and no specific application association.

Safari itself was updated to version 3.2.1 for Mac and Windows last month. It requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later, or 10.5.5 or later; the Windows version requires XP or Vista.

And that leaves us with Internet Explorer - see page 3.