To manually update, select 'About Google Chrome' from the Help menu under the vertical ellipsis at the upper right; the resulting tab shows that the browser has been updated or displays the. Chrome checks for new updates regularly, and when an update is available, Chrome applies it automatically when you close and reopen the browser.
© Illustration by Alex Castro / The VergeGoogle is wrapping up 2020 with what it claims are major performance enhancements to the company’s Google Chrome browser. “This month’s update represents the largest gain in Chrome performance in years,” Matt Waddell, Chrome’s director of product, wrote in a blog post. Sounds pretty exciting on the surface, no? Waddell says a slew of under-the-hood changes and optimizations have led to boosts to Chrome on several fronts.
The first has to do with tabs. Chrome will now prioritize your active tab over the others in the background, “reducing CPU usage by up to 5x and extending battery life by up to 1.25 hours (based on our internal benchmarks).” Google goes into greater detail on just what it’s doing to keep tabs in check (hint: it involves throttling JavaScript) at the Chromium blog. “We’ve done this without sacrificing the background features that users care about, like playing music and getting notifications.”
But even opening Chrome should feel faster. The browser now launches 25 percent faster — hopefully to where you’ll notice the difference. It loads pages up to 7 percent faster, “and does all of this using less power and RAM than before.”
Tab search in #Chrome is a new way to find an open tab – just type the page name you’re looking and for and it’ll pop up. Learn more about this latest version of Chrome → https://t.co/NrsADN8PMvpic.twitter.com/1R5azL68lf
— Chrome (@googlechrome) November 17, 2020Google is also adding tab search, which is exactly what it sounds like and could be a godsend for those of us buried under an avalanche of them. “You’ll now be able to see a list of your open tabs — regardless of the window they’re in — then quickly type to find the one you need.” This feature is debuting on Chromebooks first and then expanding to other desktop versions of Chrome.
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The address bar is getting a bit more useful with something Google calls Chrome Actions, “a faster way to get things done with just a few keystrokes.”
For example: when you type “edit passwords,” or “delete history,” you can now take action directly from the bar. Our first set of actions — available initially on desktop — focuses on privacy and security, so you can increase your peace of mind in a few clicks.
Google Chrome Update Latest Version
And last, you might soon notice “cards” when you open a new tab in Chrome.
To help you jump back into activities like planning a meal, researching a holiday gift, or winding down with a video, we’ll soon add cards to your new tab page in Chrome. Clicking on them will take you to recently-visited and related content on the web, and save you time in the process.”
For now, cards will only appear “for some users” beneath the shortcuts area; Google says it’s planning to add entertainment-focused cards in 2021.
All these things together add up to a significant update for the world’s most popular web browser. And they come on the very day that Apple is being lauded for the speed and efficiency of its new M1 Mac computers. Speaking of which, Chrome for macOS also gets a new icon that’s a better fit for the latest Big Sur release. But I’m way more excited about the faster performance.
Latest Google Chrome update comes with a new macOS icon that fits better on Big Sur. pic.twitter.com/6oTtDZWLWY
— Chris Welch (@chriswelch) November 17, 2020© Provided by BGR Chrome 90 updateThere are plenty of things you can do to keep yourself safe while browsing the internet, and near the top of that list is making sure that all your apps and programs are up-to-date. For example, Google rolled out Chrome 90 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac, and Linux on April 14th with dozens of security fixes, but less than a week later, another update has arrived that everyone who uses Google’s browser should install as soon as possible.
As Chrome’s technical program manager Srinivas Sista revealed in a blog post, Chrome version 90.0.4430.85 comes with seven security fixes, one of which addresses a zero-day vulnerability that Google says has been exploited in the wild. The zero-day is referred to as CVE-2021-21224, and Google describes it as “Type Confusion in V8.” As Google explains, “V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.”
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Sista goes on to highlight five crucial fixes that have been included in the Chrome version 90.0.4430.85 update:
New Chrome Update Features
- CVE-2021-21222: Heap buffer overflow in V8. Reported by Guang Gong of Alpha Lab, Qihoo 360
- CVE-2021-21223: Integer overflow in Mojo. Reported by Guang Gong of Alpha Lab, Qihoo 360
- CVE-2021-21224: Type Confusion in V8. Reported by Jose Martinez (tr0y4) from VerSprite Inc.
- CVE-2021-21225: Out of bounds memory access in V8. Reported by Brendon Tiszka (@btiszka)
- CVE-2021-21226: Use after free in navigation. Reported by Brendon Tiszka (@btiszka)
Chrome doesn’t always apply the latest updates when you open the browser, so if you want to check and see which version you’re running, go to Settings and then click About Chrome at the bottom of the menu bar on the left side of the screen. If you’re already running the latest version of Chrome, you’re good to go, but otherwise, you should begin the process of updating. Once it’s downloaded, click the Relaunch button to finish updating.
Patching dangerous exploits is just one of many reasons to update to Chrome 90. As we reported previously, the update also defaults to HTTPS for most typed navigations, which improves privacy and speeds up loading times for websites that support the protocol. Most sites that you visit use HTTPS, but for those that don’t, Chrome will still fall back to HTTP when and if the HTTPS attempt fails, so you can still visit those sites.
Additionally, Chrome 90 introduced a new Search Tabs button at the top of the browser that has been a monumental addition for those of us who spend all day opening, closing, rearranging, and sorting through browser tabs. The feature is poised to get even better in the near future as well, as Google is testing a “recently closed tabs” section on the Chrome Canary browser that would make it easier to find tabs you accidentally X’d out of.
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