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Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1, Firefox 1.5.0.5 Available

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the yay-for-mythical-creatures dept.

nuyorker and hdm wrote to mention the new releases for Thunderbird and Firefox. hdm writes "This release of Firefox fixes 12 security holes, many of which can be used to execute malicious code. The Browser Fun project has provided an online demonstration of one of these flaws. This demonstration is capable of executing code on Windows, Linux, and both architectures of the Mac OS X platform; you're going to want to upgrade today!"

2 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So much for security... by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But that's what people give MS shit for, finding and fixing security holes. The attitude is that, had there been better design, the holes would not have existed in the first place. I've often seen it preached that OSS doesn't have the same problems since many eyes look at it and thus find all the bugs. That is, of course, not the case. I think the GP was simply pointing that out. some people feel like running Firefox is a magical security shield, that it doesn't have problem. Well, it does, they just don't seem to be getting exploited before there's a chance to fix them.

    Of course one has to wonder what will happen as it becomes more popular. Plenty of people installed it before it started auto updating. Not too long ago I came across a grad student's laptop that was still running a pre 1.0 version. They figured they were safe and there was no reason to update since what they had worked.

  2. a problem with firefox installs by doom · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Would anyone want to hear a semi-relevant complaint about Firefox? There's some major suckage in the installer as far as Linux is concerned. If you make the mistake of trying to put the new version of firefox where the existing version is, it's entirely too easy to end up blowing away an entire directory -- e.g. your "/usr/bin".

    Try to imagine writing a shell script that would cheerfully do a cd /usr/bin; rm *. Can you? Now look at this bug report: bug 234479

    One of the programmers (Andrew Schultz) can't imagine any way of dealing with version skew problems outside of completely erasing the installation directory in order to start from scratch.