Mozilla Firefox Version 34 Released with Critical Security Updates ~ Security Garden

Mozilla sent Firefox Version 34.0.5 to the release channel. The update includes eight (8) security updates, three (3) of which are Critical, three (3) High and two (2) moderate.

Default Search Engine Changes

Mozilla is including major changes in default search engines in the release of version 34, reportedly "Promoting Choice and Innovation". Looking deeper, perhaps the real reason is the flat revenue from Google-Firefox search deal.

Regardless of the reason behind the change, the default search engine in North America has been changed to Yahoo! According to the agreement, Yahoo! will support "do not track". Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Amazon, Twitter and Wikipedia continue to be built-in as alternate search options. After updating, there was no change to Bing as my choice for search engine.

For search engine changes in other countries, see New Search Strategy for Firefox: Promoting Choice & Innovation.

Fixed in Firefox 34

2014-90 -- Apple CoreGraphics framework on OS X 10.10 logging input data to /tmp directory
2014-89 -- Bad casting from the BasicThebesLayer to BasicContainerLayer
2014-88 -- Buffer overflow while parsing media content
2014-87 -- Use-after-free during HTML5 parsing
2014-86 -- CSP leaks redirect data via violation reports
2014-85 -- XMLHttpRequest crashes with some input streams
2014-84 -- XBL bindings accessible via improper CSS declarations
2014-83 -- Miscellaneous memory safety hazards (rv:34.0 / rv:31.3)

What’s New

New -- Default search engine changed to Yahoo! for North America
New -- Default search engine changed to Yandex for Belarusian, Kazakh, and Russian locales
New -- Improved search bar (en-US only)
New -- Firefox Hello real-time communication client
New -- Easily switch themes/personas directly in the Customizing mode
New -- Wikipedia search now uses HTTPS for secure searching (en-US only)
New -- Implementation of HTTP/2 (draft14) and ALPN
New -- Recover from a locked Firefox process in the "Firefox is already running" dialog on Windows
Changed -- Disabled SSLv3
Changed -- Proprietary window.crypto properties/functions re-enabled (to be removed in Firefox 35)
Changed -- Firefox signed by Apple OS X version 2 signature
Fixed -- CSS transitions start correctly when started at the same time as changes to display, position, overflow, and similar properties

Update

To get the update now, select "Help" from the Firefox menu at the upper left of the browser window, then pick "About Firefox." Mac users need to select "About Firefox" from the Firefox menu.

If you do not use the English language version, Fully Localized Versions are available for download.

References

Remember - "A day without laughter is a day wasted."
May the wind sing to you and the sun rise in your heart...

Tuesday, December 02, 2014