Next week will be a big week of Mozilla with two releases. One showing the present, the other – the future.
Firefox 3.5.4 is now available for beta testers and it fixes a number of stability issues as well as an as-yet unreported number of security vulnerabilities. Mozilla’s practice (and it’s a good one) is not to post its security advisories for the beta builds, but rather not until the release is considered to be generally available.
It’s a bit annoying from my own journalist point of view, but it does make sense especially if the security vulnerabilities are not being exploited (yet).
After all, why would anyone want to post a fully public advisory about a security issue that hasn’t properly been fixed/tested yet? That’s not a good security practice.
There will also be fixed (probably a few of the same) in Firefox 3.x wit the 3.0.15 release. Both the 3.5.4 and 3.0.15 releases are currently scheduled for Oct 21st.
Also on October 21st will be the first public beta of Firefox 3.6 codenamed Namoroka. That’s right, contrary to other reports, Firefox 3.6 beta is not officially available (yet). There is a test build (in the nightlies directory), but there usually is a difference between the test builds and what ends up being the publicly available beta. So my advice is to wait for the ‘real’ beta.
Firefox 3.6 is a big release even though it is only being given a minor point number.
