Mozilla has taken the new Firefox 16 offline a day after its release, after discovering a major "security vulnerability".
The release was part of Mozilla’s plan to compete against Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Mozilla director of security assurance Michael Coates said that the organisation is aware of a security vulnerability in the current release version of Firefox."
According to Coates, the vulnerability in Firefox 16 could allow a malicious website to capture web history, allowing hackers to see what websites people have visited.
"At this time we have no indication that this vulnerability is currently being exploited in the wild," Coates added.
Mozilla said that users who have already upgraded to Firefox 16 can downgrade to version 15.0.1, which is not affected.
Later Firefox, which has an estimated 450 million users worldwide, said that it issued fixes for Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.
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Following the report, the company has released an updated Firefox browser called 16.0.1 addressing the security glitch that could have allowed sites to find out which other web pages users had visited.
The update also improves the mobile browser’s stability on Android devices running CyanogenMod 10 (CM10).
In July this year, Firefox 14 had added default support to improve security and privacy for users in HTTPS connection when conducting Google searches.
