14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox development is coming along as planned, with all branches moving forward at a steady pace. Future major releases already have a set time schedule, and feature and design changes are already being proposed, with Firefox 3.6 coming this fall and 3.7 in spring 2010. This, less than a month after the big 3.5 release, which brought a large number of new or upgraded features. Current versions are still being maintained as well, with 3.5.1 having been launched last week and now 3.0.12 coming out with some security and stability fixes.
Firefox 3.0.12 is just a minor bug-fixing release, part of the maintenance program at Mozilla. The latest version fixes six security vulnerabilities with five of them labeled as critical, which could potentially be used to run arbitrary malicious code with no intervention from the user. Two bugs that would crash the browser and could be used for remote code execution were fixed as well, as was a crash that would lead to memory corruption in the Gecko engine, which is now at version 1.9.1/19.0.12, and a heap/integer overflow issue in font glyph rendering libraries.
Several stability problems were also resolved, as well as two issues introduced in the previous version 3.0.11, one that would freeze Firefox when loading the Java plug-in and one where the browser wouldn't save the data properly when the home directory was on a remote location. An issue affecting only Mac OS X users, where certain AppleScripts would fail to work properly, was also resolved.
The 3.0.x branch will be supported until January 2010 with bug fixes coming up to that point. Mozilla is strongly advising users to update to the latest Firefox 3.5. If that isn't possible for whatever reason, they should still update to 3.0.12 as soon as possible.
Firefox 3.0.12 as well as 3.5.1 for Windows are available for download here. Firefox 3.0.12 as well as 3.5.1 for Linux are available for download here. Firefox 3.0.12 as well as 3.5.1 for MAC OS X are available for download here.