Firefox browser pulled for vulnerability

California-based Mozilla says it pulled its latest version of its Firefox Web browser just a day after its release because of a critical security vulnerability. "Mozilla is aware of a security vulnerability in the current release version of Firefox (version 16). Firefox version 15 is unaffected," Michael Coates, Mozilla's director of security assurance, said Wednesday in a post on the company's security blog. The bug was apparently overlooked by Mozilla while it was developing the new version or may have inadvertently been introduced by the fixes for earlier problem incorporation in the version 16 upgrade that started reaching users early Tuesday, Computerworld reported. The fixes were to patch 24 vulnerabilities in the earlier version. Coates' posting that Firefox 15 did not contain the new vulnerability suggested it was either an entirely new and overlooked bug affecting only Firefox 16 or that it was introduced by the patching process, Computerworld said. As a precaution, Mozilla said, it has pulled Firefox 16 from its primary download site until it prepares a fixed version 16.1.