A new vulnerability has been found within Firefox 3. The vulnerabilty it seems was known about prior to release however the person who found it decided not to post it until the browser was released. The vulnerability enables an attacker to take over a users pc and is considered a high severity bug.
According to the article, it also affects previous versions (2.X).
That means its probably in the hundreds of millions.
For example all the computers at the highschool I just graduated from had Firefox installed, but my guess is they didn't all download 3.0 yesterday.
Another reason why its a bad idea to upgrade after a major release. I guess I will have to go back to using Opera until this whole ordeal is sorted out, since I really don't want to risk having my computer being overtaken. :P
They rarely release details until it is fixed. Problem is though as it is an old bug that has resurfaced wouldnt be that difficult to look through bugtracker to find the same problem that occured in V2
Why would anyone be surprised by this? FF3 is a HUGE amount of new code - and from what i've seen is still quite unstable.
It will get better in 5-6 patch releases - but it is not there yet. Some good new features and ideas - but just needs to mature.
People are hilarious how religious they are in their love of FF - it is just a piece of code... sometimes it's blind adherance to standards over sound design logic is the picture of stupidity.
Firefox 3 offers many improvements from v2. Anyone who blindly refuses to upgrade out of fear needs to find a better excuse. :/ I'd be willing to bet that each and every one of you is running software that's vulnerable to code execution by way of a buffer overrun.
The exploit being reported here is currently private. That means that the few people who have it are people who have money and would be willing to pay for it (spammers). Unless you go around clicking on links to sites with malicious content regularly or are a primary target for spammers (idiots), you don't have much to worry about.
Also, Firefox 3 has been running pretty stable on my machine. No more memory leaks when I have a lot of tabs open.
Remember, this vulnerability affects older versions of Firefox too. You're no safer staying with FF2, so you might as well upgrade *cough*to Opera*cough* .