Mozilla plugs 13 holes in Firefox, retires older 2.0 browser
Compounding the retirement of Firefox 2.0 is Mozilla's decision to drop antiphishing protection from Tuesday's Firefox 2.0.0.19. Done at Google Inc. 's request -- the search company produces the blacklist of risky sites -- the withdrawal means that users won't be warned of potentially dangerous URLs before they reach them.
Google asked Mozilla to disable the feature in Firefox 2.0.0.19 because the older browser line uses an obsolete protocol.
While there are no Mozilla-provided work-arounds, users who want to stick with the older browser can turn to alternative tools, including the Netcraft Toolbar, WOT (Web of Trust) and FirePhish extensions. All three can be downloaded from Mozilla's add-on site .
Mozilla Messaging's Thunderbird e-mail client, which relies on the Firefox rendering engine for JavaScript and other functionality, was not patched Tuesday. It remains at Version 2.0.0.18. Until Thunderbird catches up -- an update is expected in early January -- users can protect themselves against the related Firefox vulnerabilities by disabling JavaScript in the e-mail program.
The new versions of Firefox can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the Mozilla site, or users can call up their browser's built-in updater or wait for the automatic update notification, which should pop up in the next 48 hours.
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