Windows 7: Mozilla halts Firefox security updates

Stops serving updates to newest versions while it looks into startup crash bug

Mozilla has stopped providing security updates to Firefox users as it investigates a bug that caused computers to crash last week. Computerworld blogger Michael Horowitz first reported on the problem last Sunday after he tried to update older editions of Firefox on several different machines.
When Horowitz asked Firefox 3.5.11, 3.6.3 and 3.6.8 if there was an update, the browsers told him no newer editions were available. Firefox's up-to-date versions are 3.5.12 and 3.6.9, which Mozilla released a week ago when it patched 15 vulnerabilities, 11 of them labeled "critical."

Patch Tuesday from Microsoft coincided with browser updates from both Mozilla and Google this month.

Mozilla released a new version of Firefox 4 Beta that's designed to fix a pair of stability bugs that caused problems for some testers. One of the tweaks addresses a problem with plugins for the Mac version of the browser that made it hard for users to type into some web pages while the second addresses an unspecified stability issue in the Windows version of Firefox 4 beta.

The open source browser developer was keen to stress that the "beta schedule hasn’t been impacted by this additional release".

Other stability bugs have caused Mozilla to suspend automatic updates to the latest full release version of Firefox while it investigates stability bugs. Normally users of the browser will be offered new releases between 24 to 48 hours after they come out, but this is not happening with Firefox 3.6.9 and Firefox 3.5.12, released last week on 7 September.