Google Chrome is a closed-source web browser developed by Google
A few days ago, the release of the new version of the popular web browser Google Chrome 109 was announced , which fixes several bugs and introduces some new features. This new version, in particular, allows Google Chrome to eliminate a total of 17 security vulnerabilities.
Most of the externally reported security flaws are medium and low severity flaws, with only two of them rated as “high severity”. These include a use-after-free issue in overview mode (CVE-2023-0128) and a heap buffer overflow bug in the network service (CVE-2023-0129).
Google says it paid bug bounties of $4,000 and $2,000 for these vulnerabilities, respectively. A total of eight medium-severity bugs have been resolved with the latest iteration of the browser, five of which are described as inappropriate implementation flaws in Chrome components such as the Full Screen API, Iframe Sandbox, and Permission Requests.
Remaining issues include two use-after-free vulnerabilities in Cart and a heap buffer overflow bug in Platform Apps.
Main novelties of Chrome 109
The new version of Chrome 109 comes with a series of changes and improvements, most of which are focused on developers, but one of them is one of the most important in this release and is the return of support for MathML Core.
Mathematical Markup Language returns to define mathematical formulas embedded in HTML and SVG documents. Along with this, the CSS properties math-style, math-depth, and math-shift are also included to customize MathML-specific styling, as well as the value "math" for the "display" property, the value math-auto for the text transformation property, and the name "math" for the "font-family" property.
Another particularity of this new version of Google Chrome 109 is that it is the last version compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8 systems. Google announced it a few weeks ago, so Chrome 109 is the last to be installed on these versions of Windows.
On the part of the improvements in the tools for web developers it is mentioned that the JavaScript debugger has been improved to unclog variable names in Generator and asynchronous functions, the new.target property has been added to determine if it has been called to a function or constructor with the new operator.
Also note that a WeakRef object has been added to hold a reference to another object so that it is not garbage collected. Added hints to the Styles panel for inactive CSS properties inline height/width, flex, and grid. The Performance panel provides results of regular function names defined through the source map.
Other notable changes in this new version of Google Chrome 109 include:
- New features have been added to improve screen sharing.
- Added the Conditional Focus API, which adds a CaptureController object to getDisplayMedia() that can be used by an application that captures a window or tab.
- Removed support for the non-standard Event.path API and should use the Event.composedPath() method instead.
- Expanded support for speculative rules (speculation rules), which allow site authors to send the browser information about the most likely pages the user can go to.
- Added the "hyphenate-limit-chars" CSS property, which can be used to specify the minimum number of characters in the parts of a word that are separated by placing the end of a word on another line.
- Fixed a slow scrolling issue on Linux when using Wayland.
How to install Google Chrome on Linux?
If you are interested in installing this new version of this web browser and you don't already have it installed, you can download the installer offered in deb and rpm packages from its official website.