Firefox wants to update Adobe Flash Player

David Heath
Friday, 11 September 2009 08:42

Your IT - Home IT

The newest versions of Firefox (3.0.14 and 3.5.3) now test for outdated (potentially vulnerable) versions of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in.

This week, Mozilla has released updates versions of Firefox versions 3.0.13 and 3.5.2.

In version 3.5.2, there were 10 vulnerabilities, all but one 'critical,' and in version 3.0.13, all the same issues were patched, along with one additional bug unique to the older version related to the installation and removal of PKCS11 modules.

These new versions are the first to include technology to test for outdated versions of Adobe's Flash Player.  Mozilla have announced that in version 3.6 this technology will be expanded to test for outdated versions of Apple QuickTime, Adobe Flash, Shockwave and Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun Java.

This technology is important.  In a recent blog posting Johnathan Nightingale form the Mozilla project described the new technology and pointed out that in a recent survey nearly 80% of Internet users were using vulnerable versions of Adobe's Flash Player, more than two weeks after critical updates were released.

Users may manually trigger the update from the Help menu of Firefox or wait for an automatic update over the next few days.  It is also recommended that users consider upgrading any installations of Firefox v3.0 to 3.5 as security updates will not be provided for the older version after January 2010.