Macintosh Firefox users -- patch up to version 3.51

July 18, 7:23 PMSF Computer Virus ExaminerLenny Bailes

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Windows users aren't the only ones who need to worry about hacker security exploits and malware.

The Mozilla Corporation released a new Mac version of Firefox, v.3.5.1 this week that corrects a previously identified security flaw in the web browser, According to Mozilla, previous versions of Firefox had "problem with the software's  'Just-In-Time' (JIT) compiler used for JavaScript. A crash could result in an exploitable memory corruption problem that could, under certain cases, be exploited by an attacker to run arbitrary code, like malware."

 Mac users who aren't ready to upgrade their Firefox yet, can avoid this vulnerability by disabling the Just-in-Time compiler.  This procedure is described in the Mozilla Security Blog, but since it may limit the web browser's ability to access sites with legitimate Javascript code, you should consider downloading and installing the standard upgrade, which will take only a couple of minutes. 

Firefox 3.5.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. In addition to the JIT security patch, it contains a number of stability enhancements.