For the most part, Mozilla issues updates to its open source Firefox browser for both security and stability related issues. That’s not the case with the new 3.5.5 update out today.
Firefox 3.5.5 has no listed security fixes and is all about fixing a few key stability bugs.
The official list of bugs fixed in the 3.5.5 update actually only includes 5 fixed items of which three are labeled by Mozilla as being critical.
One of the critical bugs in the fixed liste deals with crashes in Firefox’s GIF image decoder. The flaw was introduced in the Firefox 3.5.4 release which came out on October 28th. The GIF flaw was reported in Mozilla bugzilla bug tracking system by Toronto staffer Joe Drew (JOE DREW!!) on October 29th.
“We’re seeing lots of crashes in the GIF decoder, involving
nsGIFDecoder2::ProcessData calling GifWrite(), then a null dereference,” Drew wrote in the bugzilla entry. “Right
now, this is showing up in the noted crash site, but this is a
Windows-specific, 3.5.4-specific crash site, since the offset in xul.dll will
change with every build, and obviously xul.dll has no meaning on OS X or Linux.”
