MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Mozilla on Monday released Firefox 2.0.0.10, a collection of patches that address critical security vulnerabilities in the areas of cross-site request forgeries and memory corruption.The update will be pushed to all Firefox users the next time they open their browsers. New users will receive the patches as part of their initial download.

The cross-site forgery requests vulnerabilities were of particular concern due to the popularity of phishing schemes that exploit spoofed URLs to trick the unwary into divulging personal information. The two patches addressing those vulnerabilities closed tiny but significant errors in the software.

The memory fix was designed to prevent a potential corruption Mozilla feared could be used to run arbitrary code.

The patches were released one week after Mozilla launched Firefox 3 beta 1 about four months later than expected. The next-generation version of the popular open-source Web browser is available in more than 20 languages for Windows, Max OS X and Linux. Although Firefox has yet to challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the same way its predecessor, Netscape Navigator, did during the Web’s infancy, Firefox has been downloaded more than 400 million times, according to Mozilla.

Release notes for the new product, which Mozilla says features a nearly complete rebuild of the core Gecko rendering engine (in version 1.9 for Firefox 3), state “Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. [The changes] put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases in beta 1, and will show further gains in future beta releases.”

According to Mozilla, the new Firefox version incorporates upgrades that are expected to improve security and ease of use, render Web pages more quickly and accurately, and provide users with more personalization options.

Mozilla isn’t saying yet when a final version of the product might be ready. “The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users,” the release notes noted.