Article by George Norman

On 04 Mar 2009

Opera may not be the most wide spread browser people use, but this is not to say that it is not a great piece of software; nor does it meant the development team behind it are going to sit idle by and let Opera users expose themselves to vulnerabilities and online threats. Consequently, barely has spring began that version 9.64 of the Opera browser has been made available to the general public – the update will plug some security holes plaguing the browser, as well as make it a more stable platform.

In order to stay safe while browsing the internet, in order to keep your system safe from harm, you are very well advised to get the Opera 9.64 security and stability update which incorporates the Opera Presto 2.1.1 user agent engine. Just to put things into perspective, more than a dozen issues have been addressed with this update.


A complete changelog is available here. The changes that caught my eye for the Windows version are listed below:
- Maliciously crafted JPEG images can no longer be used to execute arbitrary code.
- Cross domain scripting via plug-ins vulnerability has been fixed.
- Opera now features support for DEP (Data Execution Prevention) in XP SP2, XP SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP1. Also has support for ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) in Vista.
- Untrusted Rootstore capability.
- Better support for poor encryption when .p12 private certificates were imported.
- Security information docs are not written to disk.
- Feed notifications are grouped together.
- No restart required when you install an external source viewer.
- During the installation process you have the option to reset the Opera as default browser setting.

The simple fact that Opera does not have such a large user base as other browsers makes it a safer choice - malware spreaders and virus writers do not see it as such an appetizing target. Still, you should update if you have Opera installed on your machine and use it (even if not as frequent as you would like).

Speaking of other browsers, here are the latest news from the browser world: Apple released Safari 4 Beta, Google released Chrome 2.0.166.1, and the Internet Explorer version in Windows 7 Build 7048 no longer carries the Release Candidate (RC) tag. Progress on the upcoming Firefox 3.1 is still slow with Mozilla announcing they will move to Beta 4.

If you would like to get Opera 9.64, a download location is available here.



Tags: Opera, Opera 9.64

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