Linux News Today: Firefox 42 Arrives in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

Canonical just revealed that the latest Firefox 42.0 is now in the official repositories for the users of Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Firefox is the default Internet browser in Ubuntu, and that is the main reason why it seems to get special treatment. Unlike some of the other packages that don’t get updated all that often, both Firefox and Thunderbird are quickly updated when a new version is released.

The Ubuntu maintainers for these packages are very active, and they usually react very fast when they have to push a new version in the repositories.

This is, after all, one of the most used apps in the system and Mozilla usually closes a lot of vulnerabilities with each new release. Making the new version available to everyone is actually the best course of action.

Firefox 42 is a very interesting release

We covered the launch of Firefox 42 a couple of days ago, and it comes with a ton of new features. One of the best is the ability to mute a tab that has media playing in the background, although it seems to be a hit and miss on Linux systems.

“Tyson Smith and David Keeler discovered a use-after-poison and buffer overflow in NSS. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted website, an attacker could potentially exploit these to cause a denial of service via application crash, or execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking Firefox” reads the security notice.

This is just one of the problems that have been identified and fixed. More details about the issues that have been identified in the Firefox browser can be found in the security notice. Ubuntu users need to upgrade as soon as possible. This can be done in a couple of ways, either with the dedicated upgrade tool or by using the terminal.

If you decide to use the terminal, these are the commands you have to enter (root is required):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade