Chicago (IL) - Mozilla has updated its Firefox 2 and 3 web browsers. The updates, 2.0.0.17 and 3.0.2, patch almost dozen security-related issues and promise to improve the stability and reliability of the browsers.

Firefox 2.0.0.17 comes with nine fixes related to security issues, four of them described as “critical. Firefox 3.0.2 delivers five security and several stability patches and fixes minor problems with layout, themes and customized toolbars. The software also includes improvements for the password manager, fixes Mac-specific issues with keyboard shortcuts as well as certain languages, and adds new Extended Validation (EV) certificate roots.

The software also resolves a problem causing unexpected crashes that led to memory corruption and privilege escalation via XPCnativeWrapper pollution. Minor fixes solve traversal vulnerabilities and BOM characters stripped from JavaScript before execution. Mozilla says that the overall reliability of both browsers is improved; an issue of sudden crashes that occurred when using screen readers is fixed.

Firefox 3.0.2 adds new Extended Validation (EV) certificate roots that boost security and fixes a bug with password manager failing to fill in username and passwords on certain IDN sites.

The Mac version of Firefox is also patched an eliminates a bug that caused keyboard shortcuts to stop working in some cases and another one that prevented Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indic characters to be entered into text fields in Flash objects. The browser is now able to store user profiles within an AFP directory.

Firefox 3.0.2 and 2.0.0.17 are available as a free download for OS X, Windows and Linux in multiple languages.