In an attempt to address certain “performance, stability, and security” issues of its Safari Web browser, Apple Wednesday released an update, ‘Safari 4.0.4,’ with six separate security patches for which the users will need to restart their Macs.

The Safari 4.0.4 update essentially fixes three issues pertaining to potentially-abusable security flaws in the different applications that make use of WebKit, the rendering engine with which the Safari is powered. The three WebKit-related security vulnerabilities include one each for HTML5 media object handling; Windows’ FTP server connections; and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing implementation.

The update also addresses an issue with the Safari application itself, whereby the “open in new window/tab” contextual menu items resulted in loading local HTML files and the subsequent “disclosure of sensitive information.” Further, there were also chances of an “unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution” resulting from specially crafted files that issues with libxml2 and Color-Sync allowed.

Over and above fixing the security vulnerabilities, the Safari 4.0.4 update – which is available in Software Update as well as directly from the Apple Website - also includes some performance improvements, including those in JavaScript on which the Web applications largely depend; and heavy-users-specific performance improvements associated with search through “a large number of history items.”

Moreover, the update also incorporates certain non-specific stability improvements related to the search field, third-party plug-ins, and Yahoo Mail.