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Chromium 37 Launches With Major Security Fixes, 64-bit Windows Support
An anonymous reader writes Google has released Chrome/Chromium version 37 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Among the changes are better-looking fonts on Windows and a revamped password manager.
There are 50 security fixes, including several to patch a sandbox escaping vulnerability. The release also brings stable 64-bit Windows support which ...offers many benefits for speed, stability and security. Our measurements have shown that the native 64-bit version of Chrome has improved speed on many of our graphics and media benchmarks. For example, the VP9 codec that’s used in High Definition YouTube videos shows a 15% improvement in decoding performance. Stability measurements from people opted into our Canary, Dev and Beta 64-bit channels confirm that 64-bit rendering engines are almost twice as stable as 32-bit engines when handling typical web content. Finally, on 64-bit, our defense in depth security mitigations such as Partition Alloc are able to far more effectively defend against vulnerabilities that rely on controlling the memory layout of objects.
The full changelog.
Why even bother with 32 bit builds?
I think it would be nice if Chrome stored all your passwords and especially your certs (like SMIME and PGP keys) on one of Google's servers. That way you'd have them any time and anywhere you want. Google could provide encryption and provide a key escrow service to that encryption so that, if you lose your master password, Google can recover your passwords for you. With Google's safety features, nothing could possibly go wrong.
> For example, the VP9 codec that’s used in High Definition YouTube videos shows a 15% improvement in decoding performance.
Except that with this version, hardware-accelerated decoding broke scaling, so it now seems to scale as nearest-neighbor. Thankfully, on Windows it's possible to override hardware decoding with chrome://flags, which is a workaround for now.
Chrome already encrypts your data (on Windows at least) using your Windows login credentials using the Crypto API. If the user is not logged in, the passwords are impossible to read. If the user is logged in, all it takes is an API call run by that user to decrypt them, no reauthentication necessary (and this is why you lock your PC when you walk away). I think it is a very usable solution to the "but I save passwords to avoid remembering passwords, I don't want a master password" problem, but still keeping things secure.
I think cookies are encrypted now, too.
I'm sure the Brony community can provide an equine themed build to your liking.
I thought this was a story about an isotope...
It is a separate download at https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=win64.
but I cannot fathom how people, and techies specifically, trust a browser that has ties to the company that does nothing but track people for the sake of profit. I just cannot wrap my head around why people willingly are not fighting the trading of privacy for something "free". We all know the tradeoff isn't fair. Free this and free that and we are giving our lives away for what really?
I similarly distrust supermarket loyaly cards, which purport to save you money, but track and sell your preferences to third-party vendors who are also in the game for nothing but profit. One of the things that scares me is the buyers included in these companies are insurance companies, both medical and other, who then proceed to find ways to make your policies more expensive in future based on your current lifestyle. This is starting to happen.
My life is private and what I do should not cause an increase in costs for me. The goal, after all, is socialised medicine anyway, so screw for-profit medical companies.