Mozilla patches critical Firefox bug

For the third consecutive release of Firefox, Mozilla has pushed users a patch shortly after launching a new version of the browser.

On Friday, Mozilla updated Firefox to 10.0.1 to patch a crash bug that "may be potentially exploitable" by attackers. The company rated the vulnerability as "critical," its highest threat ranking.

Firefox 10 shipped the week before, on Jan. 31.

Mozilla has dealt with crash-causing bugs for the two previous releases as well.

One day after shipping Firefox 9 on Dec. 20, Mozilla issued an update to back out a fix that had generated a high number of crash reports, primarily from Mac users.

The month before, Mozilla updated Firefox 8 two weeks after its release, again to cope with Mac edition crash issues. Those crashes were traced to an Apple update of Java earlier in the month.

Mozilla updated not only Firefox, but also Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release), the new edition for enterprises that the company kicked off last month.

Firefox 10 ESR is to receive security updates -- like the one Mozilla released last Friday -- through its 54-week lifespan, but its user interface and feature set will not change during that stretch.

Users running Firefox 10 will be automatically offered the 10.0.1 upgrade, or they can trigger it by selecting "About Firefox" from the Help menu in Windows, or under the Firefox in Mac OS X.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer , or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@ix.netcom.com .

Read more about browsers in Computerworld's Browsers Topic Center.

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