The Mozilla team recently released Firefox 16 for the desktop users. The browser was released for Windows, Mac and Linux users and came packed with a number of new features. However, soon after the release, a rather serious flaw was discovered in the new version due to which, Mozilla pulled off the browser. Now, the company has released it again with a fix in place.
The problem with Firefox 16 upon its release was that it wasn’t adequately containing the data location method by JavaScript. As a result, a number of websites were able to discover what other pages a given user had visited.
The flaw was rather serious because by making use of such information through different websites, hackers could use their social engineering skills to hack into the accounts of different users. Thankfully, the flaw was spotted fairly quickly.
Within a day, Mozilla pulled off the flawed version and told its users to revert back to the earlier version. According to the Mozilla team, “As a precaution we asked Firefox users to revert back to using Firefox 15.0.1 whilst we worked to fix the problem. Firefox 16 was released with updates completely ‘throttled’, which meant that users were not automatically updated.”
The company has re-released Firefox 16, this time with the aforementioned flaw fixed. Had the flaw not been spotted so soon, it may have wrecked quite some havoc on the social media accounts of a number of users. But given the early timing of discovery, Mozilla was able to thwart any significant damages and tackle the issue quite timely.
Courtesy: BBC
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