Security News

Google has released Chrome 88 today, January 19th, 2021, to the Stable desktop channel, and it includes security improvements and the long-awaited removal of Adobe Flash Player. Chrome 88 is now promoted to the Stable channel, Chrome 89 is the new Beta version, and Chrome 90 will be the Canary version.

Google Chrome has fixed a bug that enabled antivirus programs on Windows 10 to lock newly created files. The patching of the bug means antivirus programs running on Windows would no longer block new files generated by the Chrome web browser, such as bookmarks.

Google is experimenting with increased storage for the browser cache to reduce the performance hit caused by the recently added partitioned cache feature. To prevent these side-channel attacks, Google added a new feature to Chrome 85 that partitions the browser's disk cache so that each site utilizes its own cache that cannot be read by other sites.

Google has disabled a feature that displays a warning when submitting insecure forms after receiving many complaints from users and website administrators. Google has been focusing on removing mixed-content in Google Chrome, when a secure page loads content from an insecure URL. As part of this initiative, Google rolled out a new feature in Chrome 86 that warns users when submitting insecure forms from a secure page to an insecure URL. Submitting an insecure form would display a warning about the risks of doing so and asks the user if they wish to continue submitting the information.

A Mozilla Foundation update to the Firefox web browser, released Tuesday, tackles one critical vulnerability and a handful of high-severity bugs. The specific critical bug in Firefox was also highlighted earlier this month in Google's Chrome browser security update, where it was rated as a high-severity flaw.

Some ad networks are known for ruining Google Chrome's web browsing experience with videos or large images. In September, Google announced that it will start disbanding ad iframes using too many system resources.

Google, which makes most of its money from online ads, insists it wants ad blockers to continue working under the latest, more locked-down iteration of its Chrome browser extension platform, known as Manifest v3. As a way to measure the problem, Alexandre Blondin, Chrome product manager, pointed out in a blog post on Wednesday that when Google integrated the Chrome Web Store with its Google Safe Browsing infrastructure, "The number of malicious extensions that Chrome disabled to protect people grew by 81 percent."

Google Chrome is getting a new browser heads-up display that displays performance metrics about the web pages you are visiting. To help users analyze these metrics on web pages, Google released a Chrome extension named Web Vitals that displays an on-screen HUD with performance metrics for web pages you are visiting.

To make sure Chrome users aren't utilizing weak passwords, Google Chrome's Safety check feature will alert you if your passwords were found in data breaches. Google is now working on a new feature that will automatically detect and highlight weak passwords when performing a Safety check, as shown below.

Google Chrome will soon let you search through your open web pages to find that missing page lost among a sea of tabs. To help with this mess, Google is testing a new 'Tab Search' feature in the Chrome Canary builds that allows you to search your open tabs for a particular keyword.