Just 16 hours after it’s initial release and Mozilla had to pull the latest version of their popular Firefox browser due to a security vulnerability.
Early adopters were advised to fall back to the previous safe version -
“Firefox 16 has been temporarily removed from the current installer page and users will automatically be upgraded to the new version as soon as it becomes available. As a precaution, users can downgrade to version 15.0.1 by following these instructions [http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/new/]. Alternatively, users can wait until our patches are issued and automatically applied to address the vulnerability.”
Mozilla blog
“The vulnerability could allow a malicious site to potentially determine which websites users have visited and have access to the URL or URL parameters. At this time we have no indication that this vulnerability is currently being exploited in the wild.”
Michael Coates, Director of Security Assurance
Version 16 of Firefox comes as part of Mozilla’s regular six weekly update schedule but just hours later it was removed with an updated version expected to ship imminently. Some users may have upgraded to the latest version without realising following Mozilla’s move to ‘silent updates’.
With the continuing presence of Internet Explorer in the browser market place, plus the rise of Google’s Chrome, Firefox is currently the third most popular browser. This incident may not help them improve on that position!
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
But they had a update to 16.0.1
This is odd.
They pulled 16.0 and then quickly released 16.1 some 24-48 hours later Dave.