Firefox 3.5.1 released

     Tip：Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 3.5.1, the first minor point release in the 3.5 series. The purpose of this release was largely to patch a critical security vulnerability that was found in the browser’s new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

     Q:What about the Firefox 3.5?

     A: Mozilla announced a project intended to significantly boost Firefox’s JavaScript execution performance by introducing new optimization techniques and a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine. They added Adobe’s nanojit native code generator to SpiderMonkey, the browser’s existing JavaScript interpreter. To further boost performance, they used an optimization technique called tracing that was pioneered by research scientists Dr. Michael Franz and Dr. Andreas Gal. The resulting hybrid engine, which they call TraceMoneky, is enabled by default in Firefox 3.5 last year.

     Q:What are the improvements of Firefox 3.5.1?

     A:Following the release of Firefox 3.5.1, researchers Berry-Byrne and fellow researcher Andrew Hayes discovered another bug that can be exhibited in certain conditions with the “escape” function. They have published a demonstration of this second bug at milw0rm, but have incorrectly characterized it as a stack overflow issue. Contrary to the report issued by the national vulnerability database, this second bug is not, in fact, exploitable.

     In a post at the Mozilla security blog, Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Shaver says that Mozilla is conducting further investigation into the issue, but is confident that it is not a vulnerability.

     Get more information here.

July 20, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Internet

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