14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, Mozilla and Google released new versions of their browsers, both of which contained bug fixes for multiple high and critical security issues.
The first to announce a new version was Mozilla, who launched the long-awaited Firefox version 45, which, besides removing Tab Groups and adding Synced Tabs, also fixed a lot of security issues.
Mozilla engineers addressed 22 issues, to be more exact, eight of which were ranked as critical, and seven as high severity.
Out of all the security bugs rated critical, probably the most important was the one that addressed a crucial vulnerability that could be exploited via maliciously crafted font files.
We detailed the issue in depth in one of our articles last month, and this particular bug affected more than just Firefox, being also present in Linux, OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
On the other side of the fence, Google's engineers also updated Chrome, having released version 49.0.2623.87. This minor release contained only three security issues, all considered as high priority.
Google's staff fixed a bug reported by HP's Zero Day Initiative, an out-of-bounds memory write issue that affected PDFium, Chrome's PDF rendering engine.
The other two were vulnerabilities reported by independent security researchers, who received bounties totaling $8,500 / €7,700 for their efforts put into discovering issues with Chrome's Blink engine.
Just five days earlier, Google released the first stable branch of Chrome 49, which contained 26 security fixes that pocketed independent researchers $51,000 / €46,800.