Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.4, a minor but still significant update to its multi-platform web browser. The patch fixes 16 vulnerabilities, 11 of which are said to be critical. Among these are problems with third-party media libraries, the core and JavaScript engines, web worker calls, the GIF color map parser and the string-to-number converter.

The crashes eliminated in the patch can result in memory corruption, Mozilla says, in theory leaving room for hackers to create arbitrary code exploits. The company has correspondingly released Firefox 3.0.15, addressing nine different issues with the older browser, including four critical ones.

Due on Wednesday is the first beta version of Firefox 3.6, which should make minor function enhancements while also cleaning up speed, security and stability.