

If your browser has been open for a few days, relaunch it to trigger an update. On Windows and Mac, Chrome and its relatives generally will update themselves upon launching. Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari use different codebases and are usually not affected by Chromium flaws. Those apps are sufficiently different from the desktop versions of Chrome, and from each other, that they sometimes don't get the same bugs.

There's no word yet on whether the Chrome apps for Android and iOS are affected. It's not clear whether Macs and Linux boxes are as affected as Windows PCs by this flaw, but the flaw likely existed in Chromium-based browsers on all three platforms. Neither Google or Microsoft have released more details, but odds are that a malicious designed website or image will be able to use a browser to attack the computer it runs on. The flaw was described by Google as "type confusion in V8," the JavaScript rendering engine used by Chromium-based browsers, and given a severity rating of "High."
