Opera 12.11 security and stability upgrade

Opera 12.11 security and stability upgrade:
I experienced lots of crashes after the upgrade from Opera 12.02 to 12.10 which I could not pinpoint to a particular feature or website. While I can’t – yet – say that today’s Opera 12.11 release resolves those issues for me, I can say that it is certainly an update that I have been waiting for.
The 12.10 upgrade introduced several new features in the browser, including support for SPDY which speeds up communication between the browser and sites like Gmail or Twitter that support it.
Opera 12.11 is a recommended security and stability upgrade for the browser, making it a mandatory update for all Opera users.

The changelog lists the following modifications and improvements:

• Several general bug fixes and stability improvements


• Fixes for several issues related to the new SPDY implementation in Opera


• Fixed an issue that would prevent the Gmail website from loading


• Fixed a crash on Mac systems related to extension toolbar icon updated


• Patched two security vulnerabilities in the browser.

One of the security vulnerabilities received a severity rating of high, the other a rating of low.
The high-rated vulnerability fixes the following vulnerability in Opera:

When requesting pages using HTTP, Opera temporarily stores the response in a buffer. In some cases, Opera may incorrectly allocate too little space for a buffer, and may then store too much of the response in that buffer. This causes a buffer overflow, which in turn can lead to a memory corruption and crash. It is possible to use this crash to execute the overflowing data as code, which may be controlled by an attacking site.

The vulnerability that received a low severity rating fixes the following issue:

Remote web pages should not be able to detect what files a user has on their local machine. Certain error pages do not apply this restriction correctly, allowing web pages to produce an error page where a script can run. The script can then use various events to detect whether files on the user’s computer exist or not.

Opera 12.11 is already available via the browser’s automatic update mechanism. You can check manually for updates by clicking on Opera > Help > Check for Updates. New users can download the latest version of the browser for their operating system from the official website.
On a personal note: I have not noticed any crashes since the update. While too early to tell if crashes are a thing of the past in this release, it certainly feels that way right now.

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