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Both Microsoft and Mozilla have released patches for their flagship browsers in the past 24 hours or so.

Microsoft’s patch was a response to a security hole that could allow an attacker to steal passwords from your computer using a drive-by download initiated on an infected site you might visit, or be sent to. Every version of IE, from IE5 to IE8 beta 2 is affected, so you should update immediately if you don’t use Automatic updates(or if you have it set for a long time in between updates).

Firefox versions 2 and 3 both had patches released too, though the security flaws fixed in FF were unrelated to the IE security flaw. So make sure you grab the latest version of either of those as well. Mozilla says this will be the last update to the 2.x codebase of Firefox.

Even if you don’t use either FF or IE as your primary browser, if you have either installed, update them immediately.

The busy developers over at Mozilla are at it again. They recently released a pre-alpha version of the next iteration of Firefox 3, dubbed “Minefield”. It’s pretty fast(I’m using it to make this post), although Firefox is pretty fast itself if you run it with no extensions. The extensions available for Minefield at the moment are pretty limited. There were some complaints about it being unstable(come on, it is pre-alpha after all), but I haven’t had any problems with it thus far. You can download it here, but be forewarned that it will alter your current Firefox installation to become the default version that gets launched.