Mozilla Firefox 34 Is Out, Replacing Google With Yahoo!

Mozilla Firefox 34 Is Out, Replacing Google With Yahoo!

Mozilla has just released a new version of Firefox. Firefox 34 has fixed eight major security issues along with new search and communication features. Mozilla has replaced the default search engine to Yahoo in Firefox 34. The company had announced its parting with Google on 19 November.

Firefox 34 features Hello WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications) feature in Firefox 34. Users will be able to make voice calls using Firefox Hello. It has been introduced as beta feature as of now. Users can communicate with any user who is using a WebRTC enabled browser. Mozilla has tweaked themes settings UI in this version. The company has introduced a new theme switcher called ‘personas’.

Mozilla has followed Google’s footsteps and disabled the support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0 in Firefox 34. Google has temporarily disabled SSL 3.0 support in Chrome 39. Mozilla believes that removing the support for SSLv3 will protect more users from inherent vulnerabilities.

Mozilla has patched eight security fixes in Firefox 34. Out of these eight, three are critical security vulnerabilities. Mozilla has fixed CVE-2014-1592 memory issue in Firefox 34, this vulnerability is known as use-after-free memory issue. Mozilla has focused more on fixing miscellaneous memory safety hazards in Firefox 34. Mozilla has also fixed CVE-2014-1593 which was reported by a Google security researcher. CVE-2014-1593 is a buffer overflow issue that can lead to exploitable system crash.

The major change in Firefox 34 is the new default search engine. Mozilla is using Yahoo as default search provider for United States users while, they are using Yandex in Russia and Baidu search engine for China. However, Mozilla has also added an option for users to customise the default search engine and revert it back to Google.

Firefox 34 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux computers. However, Ubuntu users will have to wait for 24 hours to get Firefox 34. Canonical is yet to roll the Firefox 34 on the software center.