June 15th, 2009
Firefox 3.0.11 fixes 67 bugs including bookmark corruption
The latest update to Firefox addresses 67 bugs and enhancements, according to Mozilla. 23 bugs were marked as “critical” or higher. (Coincidentally this was the same number addressed by the 3.0.9 update in April.)
Nine potential security vulnerabilities were patched including 1 marked as “high” and 4 “critical”:
- MFSA 2009-32 JavaScript chrome privilege escalation (critical)
- MFSA 2009-31 XUL scripts bypass content-policy checks
- MFSA 2009-30 Incorrect principal set for file: resources loaded via location bar
- MFSA 2009-29 Arbitrary code execution using event listeners attached to an element whose owner document is null (critical)
- MFSA 2009-28 Race condition while accessing the private data of a NPObject JS wrapper class object (critical)
- MFSA 2009-27 SSL tampering via non-200 responses to proxy CONNECT requests (high)
- MFSA 2009-26 Arbitrary domain cookie access by local file: resources
- MFSA 2009-25 URL spoofing with invalid unicode characters
- MFSA 2009-24 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.11) (critical)
The new release addresses a problem that apparently affected a lot of people (bug 464486). If Firefox crashed or your machine died at just the right time, your bookmarks and history database could have been lost or corrupted. The earliest report I could find of the problem was on September 7th, 2008.
In the end, a 2 line fix to turn on full synchronous operation of the SQLite database used to store bookmarks was all that was needed. Although the fix was known in January, it wasn’t backported to Firefox 3.0 until recently because of concerns about how it might affect performance, especially on Linux. Further study showed, however, that performance was only slightly degraded on newer versions of Linux, and data integrity was deemed to be more important.
Mozilla has been updating Firefox 3 approximately once a month since its release in June of last year. Here’s a list of all the updates so far:
- v3.0.11, released June 11, 2009
- v3.0.10, released April 27, 2009
- v3.0.9, released April 21, 2009
- v3.0.8, released March 27, 2009
- v3.0.7, released March 4, 2009
- v3.0.6, released February 3, 2009
- v3.0.5, released December 16, 2008
- v3.0.4, released November 12, 2008
- v3.0.3, released September 26, 2008
- v3.0.2, released September 23, 2008
- v3.0.1, released July 16, 2008
- v3.0, released June 17, 2008
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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