Come to find out, Firefox 1.0.6 was released on the 19th, just one week after 1.0.5 came out, apparently to address the nine new highly critical security flaws found in the past week. Firefox, despite all your security holes, PLEASE wait at least a month until the next version! (For those that don't know what the problem is, with most other software, you can simply just get the patches or updates and not have to reinstall the whole program. Not so with Firefox - you have to get the whole program again and again and reinstall it. LAME!) Also, upgrading your browser every week is ridiculous. Everyone chided Microsoft for issuing too many patches too close together, and now Firefox is falling into the same loop. Firefox needs to stick to monthly versions, plain and simple - and fix the stinkin' Software Update tool! I don't think anyone feels that Firefox is a secure browser any more. I know people once did, but come on - we're past Firefox's honeymoon stage now.

And another thing, their download numbers have got to be horribly inflated. There's no way that 73 million UNIQUE people have downloaded Firefox just one time. It's more likely that 7.3 million people have each downloaded 10 different versions of it, like I have (I first tried version 0.7 over a year and a half ago, and have dutifully downloaded almost each major release since: 0.8, 0.9, 1.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3, 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.0.6). For history's sake, Firefox used to be called Phoenix, then Firebird, and now Firefox.

With the ever-growing appearance of Atom 1.0 feeds, it's time for me to resume hunting around for a more up-to-date XML feed newsreader. Fun. As of tonight, we are proud owners of both the hardback book version and also the cassette audiobook version of J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". Sweet.

UPDATE: I emailed Secunia about the 9 recent Firefox security holes, and they responded that version 1.0.5 fixed these flaws, not version 1.0.6. In other words, 1.0.5 fixed those flaws, and 1.0.6 was released to fix another set of problems (API compatibility problems with extensions and web apps), but not security flaws.