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Friday 3rd February 2006

Firefox plugs memory leaks 10:28AM, Friday 3rd February 2006

The Mozilla organisation, the developers of the open source browser Firefox and Thunderbird email client, has released an updated version of Firefox. The new version 1.5.0.1 is part of Mozilla's continuing improvement programme and fixes many of the bugs that have surfaced over the past few months.

The new point release is said to offer greater stability, improved support for Mac OS X (though no details are given in the release notes), and fixes for several memory leaks and a number of security issues which have cropped up. It also enables International

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Domain Name support for Iceland (.is).

The biggest problem addressed is that of memory leaks. Among the vulnerabilities addressed are ones such as integer overflows, reading beyond buffer while parsing XML feeds, and issues where a long document title could leave the system open to a denial of service attack.

The announcement by Mozilla is the 'official release'. Last week a number of Firefox users of the earlier betas 1.5b1 or 1.5b2 found themselves unexpectedly upgraded after their browser's update channel remained set to beta.

The 1.5.0.1 release is part of Mozilla's announced plans to roll out security and "minor polish" updates to Firefox every two months. The developers say they plan to natively support Intel based Macintoshes starting with Firefox 1.5.0.2

Firefox 1.5.0.1 is available at the Mozilla.com site.

Steve Malone

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