Google has officially lifted the curtain on Chrome 69 for Windows, Mac and Linux this week. The tech giant’s latest browser version comes loaded with new security features and a slew of patches.
Overall, the update included 40 security fixes. Several of those were rated “high,” including five out-of-bounds flaws (CVE-2018-16065, CVE-2018-16066, CVE-2018-16067, CVE-2018-16068 and CVE-2018-16069), an integer-overflow glitch (CVE-2018-16070) and a use-after-free vulnerability (CVE-2018-16071).
“Chrome 69.0.3497.81 contains a number of fixes and improvements…The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 69 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux,” Google said in a post Tuesday about the updates. “This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.”
Also notable in Google’ latest Chrome release is the beginning of its flagging of less-secure HTTP websites. When users visit an HTTP page, they will no longer be labeled as “secure” on the navigation bar. And later, starting with Chrome 70, Google plans to take that a step further by actively labeling HTTP sites as “not secure” on the navigation bar.
The move comes as Google hopes to prompt a continued shift from HTTP pages to the more secure HTTPS websites, which encrypt traffic flowing to and from a website.
Chrome 69 also comes with a revamped password manager. When a user needs to create a new password, the desktop edition of Chrome will generate a unique password and enable that password for login on laptops and phones.
Even beyond Chrome 69, Google has been rolling out a range of security features this summer.
That includes pushing out new security mitigations for Chrome 67 users to defend against recently discovered Spectre variants. That’s via a fresh security feature called site isolation, which essentially isolates different browser work processes between various browser tabs.
Overall, the update contains significant changes to the user experience.
“We launched an ad blocker to keep you safe from malicious and annoying ads, helped move the web to HTTPS to keep you secure online, launched site isolation which provides deeper defense against many types of attacks including Spectre, and brought virtual reality and augmented reality browsing to Chrome,” Chrome product management desktop lead Ellie Powers said in a post on Tuesday. “And we’re now rolling out a set of new experiments to improve Chrome’s startup time, latency, usage of memory and usability.”
