Awesome Techs

Mozilla on Thursday issued a fifth beta of Firefox 3.6 rather than move on to a release candidate, a decision that will push the final code ship date into early 2010. Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 was released as an update to current testers early Thursday, and can also be installed by others who download it from Mozilla’s site.

Beta 5 has 130 new bug fixes, including a major TraceMonkey JavaScript rendering engine bug that was causing crashes. Additionally, the private browsing mode, password retrieval and fast startup mode were updated.

“Beta 5 builds are being tested by QA now, targeting a Thursday release unless we get to RC [Release Candidate] first,” Mozilla had said earlier in the week. “We are really, really close to being code-complete & only need 8 more patches and a TraceMonkey merge. If we can go to build today or tomorrow, QA will scrap Beta 5 and we’ll release RC to the beta audience ASAP.”

“Mozilla released a fifth version of Firefox 3.6 to its more than 600,000 beta users as part of its continuing program to gather feedback and get fixes into the hands of the people evaluating the preview,” added Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, via CW. “We expect to be able to issue a release candidate before the end of this year, but we’ll likely hold off on the official release until early in the new year.”

Mozilla yesterday released Firefox version 3.5.6. The update resolves three critical security holes, and also patches up some stability issues.

The 3 critical flaws are

• Integer overflow, crash in libtheora video library
• Memory safety fixes in liboggplay media library
• Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.1.6/ 1.9.0.16)

All three of the critical vulns create a possible mechanism for hackers to inject hostile code onto vulnerable systems, via drive-by download attacks or similar malign trickery. Possible consequence of leaving the flaws unfixed can be found a security advisory by Secunia here.

In an effort to settle a long standing antitrust case brought by the European Commission over the bundling of Windows OS’ with Internet Explorer, Microsoft has promised to give Windows 7 buyers their choice of rival web browsers when the OS ships in October.

The OS will be pre-loaded with multiple browsers, and would-be buyers can choose from a “ballot” which browser they want. As always, users can choose one and then download another, or a few others and use whichever they want whenever they want.

The other browsers were not disclosed but the obvious choices would be Firefox, Safari, Opera and the newer Chrome.

EC officials are expected to review the proposal, after denying past Microsoft proposals.

Credit:AfterDawn