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Mozilla Corp. late Tuesday patched 11 vulnerabilities in Firefox 3.0, more than half of them labeled "critical," and fixed 14 flaws in the older Firefox 2.0.

Firefox 3.0.2 quashes six critical bugs, four marked "high," and one pegged as "low" in Mozilla's four-step threat ranking system. Among the most serious were four stability bugs in the browser's graphics rendering, layout and JavaScript engines that can crash the program and might be exploitable with malicious code.

"Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code," said Mozilla in the accompanying advisory.

The Register has posted an article that a round of screenshots has been posted to the web recently about the next Microsoft Windows operating system (OS).

The images were posted at ThinkNext.net but the site received a suit so the site decided to remove them. However, according to The Register’s article, people could see them at Windows7news.com at the moment. Austin Modine, the author of the article at The Register, notes that the next OS seems to be using the Office 2007 Ribbon interface in the Paint and Wordpad softwares.

A start menu, administration windows, Paint, Calculator, and Windows Media Player are shown in some of images.

Adobe Systems rolled out Adobe Creative Suite 4 Tuesday, aiming to push the creative process for designers across print, Web, mobile, interactive, film and video production. The software release also integrates Flash across the entire product line.

Creative Suite 4 is Adobe's largest software roll out to date and includes Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design editors, Creative Suite 4 Web editions, Creative Suite 4 production premium, Creative Suite 4 Master Collection. CS4 Master edition is billed as combining "virtually all of Adobe's new design and development applications, technologies and services in a single box."

"Designers and developers are shaping the way that people consume information, share ideas, sell products, tell stories and create memorable experiences -- in print, online and via mobile handsets," Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe, said in a statement. "Whether you're creating a rich Internet application, a video or a best-selling magazine, Adobe Creative Suite 4 delivers powerful cross-media technologies that have the ability to elevate products, brands and ideas above the clutter."

Designers who work with Adobe Creative Suite can look forward to a simplified workflow, streamlining the design process and making it easier to complete tasks. Additionally, artists will no longer have to abandon a project when switching between mediums.

Users of InDesign are treated to a new Live Preflight tool that allows designers to catch production errors and a customizable Links panel to place files. The Content-Aware Scaling tool in Photoshop automatically recreates an image as it is resized, meaning parts of the image won't be lost as it adjusted for size.

One other area where Creative Suite 4 offers an upgraded set of tools and design capability is in 3D rendering. CS4 allows designers to paint, composite and animate 3D models. Animation also gets an upgrade in CS4. Flash Creative Suite 4 allows users to apply tweens, or generating intermediate frames between two images, to objects instead of keyframes, creating more control of animation attributes.