Tag: Chrome Browser

In their continuing effort to keep end users safe and aware when they are visiting a non-secure website, Google has announced that starting in July 2018, these sites will be clearly identified in the Chrome browser.  The change will coincide with the release of Chrome 68 and will be across all platforms as well as Chrome OS.  A non-secure website is noted as http:// when you visit the site while a secure, encrypted site is noted as https:// in the URL.

The official announcement should not come as a surprise.  Google has already been urging sites to move to secure deployments with changes in how page ranking is done for secure versus non-secure sites.  This is the culmination of that effort.

Following the release of an updated Chrome for Android, the Chrome browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux has a new update rolling out today.  The updated version is build 63.0.3239.84 for those keeping score at home and gets desktop users of the browser on the Chrome 63 train.

Along with the updating to the base version of Chrome, this update also brings a lot of fixes.  There are 37 named fixes in this update but the details of exactly how it was fixed will remain confidential for a few more weeks.  This is a normal practice by Google to assure that users have had time to update and are not exposed to the vulnerability.  Most of the have to deal with spoofs or other exploits.

The Flags page in Chrome has been updated too.  Now if you type chrome://flags in the ominbar, you will see the new Material Design inspired look to these experimental settings in the browser.

Slow and steadily, Material Design is making its way into the Chrome browser.  Right now there is a behind-the-scenes update that brings the more polished look to the Chrome notification panel.  If you aren’t familiar with this feature, it is under the bell icon in the taskbar in Chrome.  It gives you notifications from other Google services like Google+, Google Photos and the like.  Previously, this panel was pretty slow to load and frankly, looked a bit dated when you compare it to the beautiful Material Design look of other parts of the browser or even Google’s own websites.  If you have the latest version of Chrome browser, you will get this update and will know you have it when you see a couple of visual clues.

First, the color changing orb that shows up when notifications are loading is gone.  Now you a simple, clean progress bar at the top of the panel.  Second, you will see your notification in sub-divided areas.  So update for Google+ are under one section, Google Photos for another, and so on.

If you are a Google Chrome user on your Windows PC or Mac, there is a small but important update that has been released.  The updated builds are 54.0.2840.99 for Windows and 54.0.2840.98 for Mac.  Note that there is no update for Linux yet.  According to the release notes from the Chrome team, there are additional changes to the browser for that platform and it will be updated tomorrow.  The update will come via an OTA update but if you want to force the issue, go to chrome://help in the browser and it will force the update to happen.  I’ve already done this for my Macbook so the update is readily available.

Read on for details on what has changed.

If you are using the Chrome browser on your Windows, Mac or Linux machine, there is an important update that is out now for you to download.  The update, version 53.0.2785.113 has several security improvements in it but most of what has been fixed has not been released by the Chromium team.  As is often the case on these mid-stream releases (remember, they just released a big update last week), the team and their researchers found a significant security issue and they won’t release the details of it until a majority of users have updated to the build.  Once that happens, all the gory details can be found on the Chromium Blog.

That said, there are five named fixes in the update, two of which were considered high priority.

Users of the Chrome browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux will want to grab the latest update rolling out.  Chrome Build 53 has been pushed out by the Chromium team and with it comes a whole host of fixes, security patches and updates.  Specifically, the build is version 53.0.2785.89 for those keeping score at home and it contains 13 high priority updates amongst the total of 20 updates.  Many of those fixes have to do with Heap Overflows and spoofing which the Chromium team has closed thanks to the help of contributors globally.  If you are running Chrome on your desktop, go to chrome://help and it will automatically start downloading the update for you.  Remember that you will need to do an restart of the browser to kick in the new version.