The Security Mentor

UPDATE May 11: you can get the fixed version of Firefox at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox or at http://www.getfirefox.com.

There's a security hole in Firefox that allows bad guys to take over your computer if you do nothing but visit a web page they control. The Firefox developers are working on a fix but they haven't finished it.

For now the only workaround that anyone's sure about is to turn off "Javascript", a programming language that allows web sites to do (hopefully safe) things on your computer. You can do taht by going to Tools/Options/Web Features and unchecking the checkbox next to "Enable Javascript". Unfortunately you'd need to keep turning it back on for some useful and legitimate web sites. My favorite way to handle this problem is to install the Preferences toolbar extension so that a single click will turn Javascript on and off.

There have been too many problems like this lately. I hope the Firefox developers take a step back to see if the security problems have anything in common and to see whether they could make a design change to prevent future problems.