Mozilla Patches Firefox 26 With 14 Security Advisories

Mozilla is out today with its latest milestone Firefox release, this time providing security fixes as well as new functionality in the open-source Web browser.

The Firefox 26 release first entered beta in early November. From a security feature perspective, the big change that Firefox 26 introduces is the concept of "click-to-play" plug-ins. Prior to Firefox 26, plug-ins such as Java would just load inside the browser whenever required by a given Website, and without the need for any specific user interaction.

With Firefox 26, Mozilla has now restricted the ability of Java plug-ins to auto-load and automatically run. Other competitive Web browsers, including Apple's Safari 7, already enable the same type of functionality. One of the primary differences between Firefox 26's click-to-play implementation and Safari 7's is that Firefox currently does not block Flash media content with click-to-play. The risk from automatically enabled plug-ins is that a user could potentially be directed to a malicious Website where a plug-in is used to automatically deliver some form of malware payload.