With Firefox 4.0 hogging all the limelight, it’s easy to forget that most of the users are still using stable builds of Firefox 3.5 and 3.6. Earlier today, Mozilla pushed through a recommended security and stability update for both the trunks.

As many as nine vulnerabilities have been fixed in this release, including five critical ones. This update also fixes numerous stability and performance issues – 40 in Firefox 3.6.11 and 23 in Firefox 3.5.14 to be exact. For more information about the fixed vulnerabilities refer to the bugzilla thread for Fx 3.6.11 and 3.5.14.

[ Download Firefox 3.6.11 | Download Firefox 3.5.14 ]

Late last week, Mozilla started pushing update alerts to Firefox 3.5 users to upgrade their browsers to Firefox 3.6, looks like those alerts have borne some fruits, because Firefox 3.6 is now the most used Mozilla browser according to the recent stats.

As of today, Firefox 3.6 is used by 43% of users as compared to 23% before the push. According to the Mozilla metrics team, around 75 million users made the switch to Firefox 3.6 since the past week.

As of today, almost 186 million people have downloaded Firefox 3.6 since it’s release on January 21st 2010, which is definitely a huge number, however, this is bound to grow in the next few weeks, when more users upgrade to FF 3.6.

Another interesting fact is that Firefox 3.6 has had the most early adoption trends as opposed to Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3, this is most likely because Firefox 3.5 has had a lot of problems and crashes, and FF 3.6 provides a much more stable version of the browser.

It has been a while since Firefox 3.6 was released, and Mozilla has delayed prompting users to upgrade from Firefox 3.5 to Firefox 3.6. However, starting today Firefox 3.5 users will be prompted to upgrade to Firefox 3.6.

Users will get this prompt only if the browser has been in idle state for 10 minutes or more. Users can also upgrade to Firefox 3.6 manually through the help menu.

If you are not too keen to upgrade to Firefox 3.6, the upgrade prompt will give you an option to deny the upgrade, however, you can always upgrade Firefox manually.

For the stats junkies, Firefox 3.6 has been downloaded over 115 million times, if you are not one of them, go ahead and upgrade to Firefox 3.6 right away.

Last year was not Mozilla’s year, however, they will definitely look to make a comeback this year with a bang. Several noteworthy Firefox releases made its way to general public in the last couple of days. These include Firefox 3.5.7, Firefox 3.0.17 and the Release candidate 1 for Firefox 3.6.

A few days back, Mozilla had also released the Release Candidate 1 of Firefox Mobile for Maemo based devices.

Firefox 3.5.7

Firefox 3.5.7 is more of a stability fix release, and includes fixes for a common stability issue and a problem on how updates were being presented to users.

You can find a list of fixed bugs in this release on this page. Download Firefox 3.5.7.

Firefox 3.0.17

Firefox 3.0 is the older version of Firefox which got an update too, it also fixes an issue with how updates are provided to users. Firefox 3.0 is on the deathbed though. Mozilla will stop supporting Firefox 3.0 after January 2010.

Users who are using Firefox 3.0 are urged to upgrade to the more secure and faster Firefox 3.5. Download Firefox 3.0.17.

Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate 1 (RC1)

Firefox 3.6 RC1 is now available for downloads. Lee Matthews spotted the new build of Firefox 3.6 RC1 on the Mozilla FTP servers. The release is not available directly for HTTP downloads yet. We had done a review of Firefox 3.6 Beta 1, however, lots has changed since then. We will keep you updated about the new features included in the RC1.

Download Firefox 3.6 RC1 for Windows, Linux and Mac.

I am not a Firefox hater, and nor do I say that I immensely love it. However, Firefox overlapping Internet Explorer would give me immense pleasure, as it is really a good browser. I switched to Google Chrome out of my own needs and because Firefox has been becoming more bloated, even in a bare-bone version.

To my surprise today, I saw couple of big tech sites post about Firefox 3.5 being the world’s most used browser. Now, that would be great, but there are several factual reporting errors with their posts. First of all, Firefox 3.5 is not be the most used browser yet.

Here are the screen shots the top tech sites posted:

And here is the same data in bar graph format:

I agree that the data they jumped on was actually for December 2009, so lets see a screenshot of that.

Still not Firefox 3.5. So yes Firefox 3.5 is as large as Internet Explorer 7 for the month of December 2009, but it is not the largest browser in the World just yet.

I would be glad to break this news that Firefox 3.5 is the largest browser in the world in the next few days or maybe new week or so, but let’s just get the facts right before posting something that is not accurate.

Please note: If you see the data for last couple of weeks you will see Firefox 3.5 coming out on top, however, browser market share, mobile market share and search engine market share are not judged on few weeks of data, it takes almost 1 month of data to find a proper winner, you can of course pass your own judgement.

Mozilla has released an update to Firefox 3.5 as version 3.5.6. The new update fixes several security issues including 3 critical issues and 4 other medium and less critical ones. In addition to that, Firefox 3.5.6 also addresses several stability issues with the browser.

In all around 62 bugs were fixed in this version. Right now Firefox is not forcing an update on users, so you will have to manually update Firefox on your own. You can always refer to our tutorial on How to manually update Firefox.

Download Firefox 3.5.6

Mozilla has released two new builds of Firefox – 3.0.15 and 3.5.4. This update patches 16 vulnerabilities, (including 11 critical vulnerabilities) in Firefox 3.5 and 10 vulnerabilities (including 5 critical vulnerabilities) in Firefox 3.0. For more detail check out the official release notes for Firefox 3.0.15 and 3.5.4.

Both of these updates are billed as security and stability updates and are recommended to every Firefox user. They fix various performance and stability issues including memory leak, memory corruption and browser crashes. This update also patches various libraries used by Firefox, such as liboggz, libvorbis, and liboggplay.

Incidentally, the first beta of Firefox 3.6 is slated to be released later today. Firefox 3.6 is the leaner and meaner version, which is expected to bring user-perceptible performance improvements.

[ Download Firefox ]

Mozilla has made the Firefox 3.5.1 officially available through the Firefox site and through all the mirrors that are used for distribution.

Updates are available for all languages supported by Firefox, you can also upgrade Firefox manually without the need to download and install a new version.

Alternatively you can also wait for the upgrades to be automatically pushed to you, which may happen in the next 24-48 hours, considering that this release fixes a pretty critical security vulnerability.

Download Firefox 3.5.1

Firefox 3.5 has a highly critical Javascript vulnerability which was exposed, the problem was cause due to the new Javascript rendering engine Tracemonkey, any one who has this enabled would be affected.

However Mozilla has been working on a fix for the issue and have already started distributing copies of Firefox 3.5.1 which fixes the security bug.

The patch though is not available officially and is expected to be released in the next 48 hours.

However Martin from GHacks Tech News has a copy of Firefox 3.5.1, which he has shared with others through a mirror, this is a US version and will only work on Windows.

Download Firefox 3.5.1, also visit the Firefox 3.5.1 update post for more details about this download.

One of the biggest extension that stopped working on Firefox 3.5 was Google Gears, many users use it to access content offline in Google Reader and also for offline emails and various other services.

Though there is no official update for the Firefox add-on, you can download and use the unofficial version of Google Gears for Firefox 3.5 on Mac, Linux and Windows PCs.

However this version of Gears is unofficial beta, so if you do not like to install unstable software you might want to keep away from it.

Download Unofficial Gears for Windows and Linux or Download  Unofficial Gears for Mac OS X (Intel only).

[via Lifehacker]