Mozilla updates Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and older Firefox browsers

Mozilla has announced the release of updates for its Thunderbird email client, the SeaMonkey "all-in-one internet application suite" and older versions of its Firefox web browser. In addition to the usual bug fixes, all of the updates address several security vulnerabilities – many of them rated as critical.

Less than two years after its initial release, Mozilla has issued version 3.0.19 of Firefox, the last security and stability update to the 3.0.x branch. Mozilla had originally planned to discontinue support for Firefox 3.0 in January of this year, however, delays in releasing Firefox 3.6 extended its life for a few more months. On top of stability improvements, Firefox 3.0.19 fixes several security issues found in previous versions of the end-of-life legacy browser. Details of the security updates in version 3.0.19, however, have yet to be posted to Mozilla's Security Center site.

Alongside version 3.0.19, the Mozilla developers also announced the release of Firefox 3.5.9. The update corrects a total of eight vulnerabilities, five of them rated by Mozilla as critical. These include a privilege escalation to dangling pointer vulnerabilities and a memory corruption issue that could lead to the execution of arbitrary code on a users system. The Firefox 3.5.x branch will continue to receive security and stability updates until August 2010, although the developers strongly encourage users to upgrade to the latest Firefox 3.6 release.

Mozilla has also updated its Thunderbird email client to version 3.0.4 and SeaMonkey, the successor to the old Netscape Communicator and Mozilla Application suites, to version 2.0.4 to address several of the same vulnerabilities corrected in version 3.5.9 of Firefox.

More details about the updates can be found in the Thunderbird, Firefox (3.0.19 - 3.5.9) and SeaMonkey release notes. All users are encouraged to install the updates via Mozilla's built-in update feature (Help > Check for Updates) as soon as possible. Alternatively, Thunderbird 3.0.4, SeaMonkey 2.0.4 and Firefox 3.5.9 are available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux directly from from Mozilla. The latest stable release of the 3.6 branch of Firefox is version 3.6.2 from last week.

See also:

• Firefox 3.6.2 closes critical security hole, a report from The H.
• Mozilla officially drops support for SeaMonkey 1.x, a report from The H.
• Firefox 3.0 approaches end-of-life, a report from The H.
• Mozilla releases Thunderbird 3.1 Beta 1, a report from The H.

(crve)