Closely following Microsoft with its year-end security roll out, Apple Inc. followed suit late Monday afternoon releasing fixes for its Mac OS X operating system and the test version of its Safari browser.

The patches are available for Mac operating systems Tiger and Leopard. Their formal names are Mac OS X v10.4.11 and Mac OS X v10.5.1 respectively. The fixes come a week after Microsoft released its first Office 2007 service Pack 1.

Apple's patches include 31 updates which correct flaws Apple said could lead to unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.

The Mac OS X patches fix components which range from the Address Book and iChat software to operating system components such as ColorSync, and the IO Storage Family, Perl, Python and Ruby programming languages.

The iPhone maker also released a minor update to its Safari 3 beta code, that runs on Windows and Mac OS X, fixing a cross-site scripting security problem that affects Windows users.

The update will be automatically be made available to Mac users through the Software Update function, or downloadable at Apple's website.

Monday's patches were Apple's 35th and 36th security updates this year. Last year, the company released only 22 sets of patches for its products.