14 DAY TRIAL // Google and Mozilla released today and yesterday new versions of their famed browsers that came with numerous fixes to address various nagging security issues, and most especially in Firefox, which included four vulnerabilities rated as critical, the highest severity level.
The first one to release a new version was Mozilla, who pushed out the much-awaited Firefox 46 that featured the long-anticipated GTK3 integration for Linux systems.
Firefox 46 fixes four critical vulnerabilities
Besides the obligatory bugfixes, security fixes were also included, and Mozilla said it fixed 14 flaws, four of which were labeled as critical.
These four, CVE-2016-2804, CVE-2016-2805, CVE-2016-2806 and CVE-2016-2807, are memory usage safety issues in the browser's Gecko engine, also deployed with the company's other products such as Thunderbird.
The issues caused the browser to crash in an insecure manner, and were fixed with the release of Firefox 46, Firefox ESR 38.8m and Firefox ESR 45.1.
Chrome 50.0.2661.94 fixed nine security bugs
Google also released a new Chrome version today, 50.0.2661.94, which addressed nine security issues, reported by its staff and independent researchers.
Six of these bugs netted security researchers a total of $14,000 (€12,333). The maximum sum paid for a bug was $3,000 (€2,600), paid to four researchers.
No security issue was labeled as critical, but four were rated as high, the second-highest severity level. These issues fixed two use-after-free vulnerabilities, one in the Blink engine's V8 bindings and one in the browser's extensions component.
The other two were an out-of-bounds memory write in the Blink rendering engine, and a memory corruption issue for cross-process frames.
You can use your browser's built-in updater to check for the presence of a new version and update your browser. If you're looking for a clean install, you can get new binaries from the browser vendor's website, or from one of Softpedia's mirrors for Google Chrome (Windows, Mac, Linux) and Firefox (Windows, Mac, Linux).