Firefox 3.6.15 Fixes Java Applets Loading to Fail Issue

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 07 Mar 2011

Last week, on the first day of spring (that would be the 1st of March), the Mozilla Foundation updated several of its products. It updated Thunderbird to version 3.1.8, updated Firefox 3.5 to version 3.5.17, and updated Firefox 3.6 to version 3.6.14. All the updates were security and stability updates meant to make the software safer and more stable.

There was a problem with Firefox 3.6.14, problem that collided with the whole “this update makes the browser more stable” bit. To be more precise, some Java applets would fail to load in Firefox 3.6.14. So the Mozilla team scrambled to release a fix for the problem.

And that’s what happened on Friday, the 4th of March. On Friday, Mozilla released Firefox 3.6.15 which fixes the aforementioned issue that prevented some Java applets from loading. I got the automated update prompt earlier today when I booted up my work PC. If you’re on Firefox 3.6.14 and you did not receive the automatic update prompt, you can manually trigger an update by going to Help –> Check for Updates; or you can download Firefox 3.6.15 here. The browser is available for download free of charge in more than 70 languages for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

As mentioned above, Firefox 3.6.14 is security and stability update. If you didn’t already get the update, you are very well advised to do so. Just to put things in perspective, Firefox 3.6.14 comes accompanied by 10 security advisories. Out of them all, 1 is rated moderate, 1 is rated high, and the remaining 8 are rated critical. The critical rating is given to vulnerabilities that could be exploited by someone with malicious intent to run attacker code and install software on a targeted machine with no interaction from the user, beyond normal browsing of course.


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