On Wednesday released for, and, shorty. The new Chrome browser for PCs will roll out over the coming days to deliver some of the important features and tweaks.
Among other changes, the Chrome 64 update includes various security fixes to reduce instances of vulnerabilities such as Meltdown and Spectre CPU. The latest version also comes with the tweaks that offer an. The Chrome 64 update (version 64.0.3282.119) as many as 53 security fixes. Google hasn't yet provided full access to bug details or links. However, it has through its Chromium Security page that there are mitigations in the V8 JavaScript engine of the stable Chrome 64 build to protect against speculative side-channel attack techniques. The company also hints at a possible 'performance penalty' alongside the arrival of additional mitigations and hardening measures to reduce the impact of side-channel attacks in the future.
Desktop Progressive Web Apps are now supported on Chrome OS 67, and we’ve already started working on support for Mac and Windows. Once installed, they’re launched in the same way as other apps, and run in an app window, without an address bar or tabs.
In addition to the security-centric moves, Google has brought some changes to the Chrome 64 for Windows, Mac, and Linux to restrict abusive ad experiences. These are in line with the tweaks that are first arrived on Android devices earlier this week. The first change is the restriction of malicious auto-redirects that often come through third-party iframes. Similarly, there is the improved pop-up blocker to prevent websites with links that appear as clickable video playback buttons and site controls or transparent overlays that all force open new tabs and windows on your browser. The updated Chrome version additionally includes a setting to enable site-wide audio muting option.
You can find this setting in the permissions drop-down that comes after clicking on the info icon or the green lock icon available in the address bar, from which you can set sound behaviour for any particular site. Alongside the universal changes, the Chrome 64 for Windows brings HDR video playback that you can experience after enabling the HDR mode on your Windows 10 system. The mode is notably available through the Windows 10 Fall Creator Update and requires an HDR-compatible graphics card as well as an HDR-enabled display.
For machines running Chrome OS, there is a Split View feature that helps you open two different pages simultaneously. There is also an easy screenshot option for convertible Chrome OS devices through which you can capture screenshots with a volume down + power key combination.
The Mac browser market might be better off if Google applied some of the innovation it touts in other areas of its business to its Web browser. The latest version is once again a lightning-fast, efficiently functional browser, at or near the top of the pack in every benchmark I ran.
But the things that have changed about Chrome since this time last year don’t seem quite as significant as those that have remained stubbornly the same. If you were worried that Chrome’s interface might have changed radically in the last year, well, fear not. Not much new The pace at which Google turns out new Chrome iterations has slowed from “brain-melting” to just “really fast.” While Chrome leapt from version 8 to version 21 between 2011 and 2012, it’s “only” advanced to version 29 since then. Chrome 29's new reset button is located at the bottom of the Advanced Settings.
A review of Chrome’s release notes reveals numerous security patches and bug fixes. Since version 21, Chrome has also gained occasional speed boosts and other small new touches, including the ability to quickly display what permissions each of your installed extensions has.
A reset button, new to the latest version, claims to let you restore your browser to its original settings, including resetting your homepage, themes, new tab pages, and search engine of choice. It preserves your bookmarks, happily, and disables but does not delete your extensions. It also leaves your browser history intact, oddly. The reset button is buried at the very bottom of Chrome’s initially hidden advanced options, and I wasn’t overwhelmed by its effectiveness. The release notes mention improved guesses in the “omnibox”—the combined URL and search bar—for what you might be typing, plus new support for MathML, a markup language for easily displaying complex mathematical equations. However, none of the MathML demo pages I tried would display their samples correctly in Chrome. It may not be pretty, but Chrome 29 sure is fast.
More dismayingly, Chrome’s interface remains fundamentally unchanged from last year. The browser still lacks visual polish, and has made only minimal efforts to match Safari, Firefox, or Opera’s attempts to evolve around how people use their browsers. While you can now pin tabs to your browser window, Firefox-style, there’s still no easy way to open all bookmarks in a given Bookmarks Bar folder without right-clicking to summon a contextual menu.
I wish that as much attention was paid to human touches as to the speed and security of the underlying code. I will give Chrome one sincere compliment, though: It’s easy to switch your default search engine from Google to Bing, Yahoo, or the engine of your choice.
For a program specifically designed to keep users in Google’s ecosystem more often, that’s a laudably courteous feature. Pedal to the metal Meanwhile, the work Google has put into speed and stability improvements has definitely paid off. With a little help from hardware acceleration, Chrome ran beautiful 3D games and demos in WebGL with nary a hiccup. And a round of benchmarking tests, conducted on a 2.9GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM, ranked Google’s browser at the top of the heap in many key categories.
The aging Safari 6 still holds the crown in HTML5 vector graphics rendering; it scored nearly twice as well as Chrome 29. Google’s browser still beat Opera 15 and Chrome 21 (narrowly) and Firefox 23 (far, far more widely). In HTML5 bitmap graphics and text rendering tests, Safari again beat out Chrome, Opera, and Firefox, if only by a nose. In both cases, Chrome 21 just barely outscored Chrome 29. With help from a fast Mac, Chrome juggles complex WebGL code without slowing down or crashing.
Results for the SunSpider Javascript benchmark provided one of the testing’s biggest surprises. Chrome 29 placed second here, just a few milliseconds slower than unexpected champion Firefox. But it scored nearly 40 percent faster than Chrome 21 did on the same test. It also squeaked ahead of Opera—whose new version is built on Chrome’s code—and left Safari at the back of the pack. Chrome 29’s success in Google’s own Octane JavaScript benchmarks was perhaps less of a shock, but no less impressive. It trounced the rest of the pack, and again scored roughly 40 percent better than Chrome 21. Finally, Chrome remains the most standards-compliant browser on the Mac.
Its score of 463 points out of 500 (plus 13 bonus points) in a test of HTML5 support far outshone every other browser, and beat Chrome 21’s score by more than 30 points. Benchmarks: Chrome 29 Browser HTML5 Vector HTML5 Bitmap HTML5 Text Octane SunSpider Acid3 HTML5 Compliance Chrome 29 35.96 55.35 2 157.8 100 463/13 bonus Safari 6.0.5 56.68 56.96 7 175.5 100 393/11 bonus Firefox 23 7.94 29.14 1 151.8 100 414/10 bonus Opera 15 28.82 55.37 9 165.7 100 423/9 bonus Chrome 21 33.37 56.04 5 252.4 100 431/13 bonus Best results in bold. Reference browsers are in italics. Test results are in frames per second; higher is better.
The test results are scores; higher is better. The results are in milliseconds; shorter times are better.
The result is a score out of 100. Result is a score out of 500. Bottom line Chrome 29 gives you dazzlingly fast, reliably stable performance. But for fresh ideas about navigating the Web, or clever features that make browsing more useful, look elsewhere.
If you’re comfortable with that trade-off, Chrome 29 could satisfy your need for speed.