Mountain View, California — Global search engine titan Google on Thursday fixed 13 vulnerabilities in Chrome, and took the wraps off its full version of Chrome 8 with a number of enhancements under the bonnet including a built-in PDF viewer to the desktop browser.
Google’s latest stratagem indicates that when people click a PDF link, the document will open directly in the browser. Chrome 8 debuted Google’s built-in PDF viewer, an alternative to the bug-plagued Adobe Reader plug-in, and included support for the still-not-launched Chrome Web Store.
The search engine giant announced that around 13 vulnerabilities have been fixed in Chrome 8.0.552.215 are in a number of components, including the browser’s history, its video cataloging and the display of SVG (scalable vector graphics) animations. Four of the baker’s dozen are tagged as “high” level bugs, Google’s second-most-serious rating, while five are pegged “medium” and four are labeled as “low.”
Chrome’s built-in PDF reader is among 800 improvements in Chrome 8, as well as walled up within a sandbox, a feature intended to mitigate the security risks that are sometimes associated with Adobe’s web-standard document format, including 12 security fixes, according to a blog post yesterday by Chrome team member Jason Kersey.
This indicates that any PDF files infected with malware will be kept caged within the sandbox environment rather than being allowed to run amok with the freedom to potentially cause system-wide damage. Furthermore, there is also support for the upcoming Chrome Web Store, but given that has yet to tip up, it is currently not very useful.
Google shelled out $4,000 in bounties to five researchers for reporting vulnerabilities. Since mid-August, Google has handed out over $29,000 in bug bounty payments. Among the researchers accredited with submitting flaws was Nirankush Panchbhai, who works in Microsoft’s vulnerability research group.
Panchbhai was not one of the researchers paid a bounty, the search engine leader paid out $1,000 to each of three explorers of high-risk vulnerabilities and $500 to two discovers of medium-risk vulnerabilities.
The new Chrome 8.0.552.215 supersedes both the earlier beta and stable versions. The new version arrives just about six weeks after Google released Chrome 7; bringing improved 3D graphics handling. The faster release pace this year means new Chrome versions are not necessarily as big of a departure from their predecessors.
For those with a taste for innovative features but less stability, there is the Chrome Dev channel, which is on the 9.x release version. The next version of the browser, Chrome 9, is expected to introduce hardware acceleration. This feature, which will bring Google’s browser in line with Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer 9, was originally supposed to appear in Chrome 8.
2011 is shaping up to be a two horse race between Mozilla and Google to win over those who are disillusioned with Microsoft’s Internet Exploder. While it is no surprise that the Vole’s Internet Explorer is getting along badly against superior competitors, Mozilla has been forced to up its game, especially in terms of browser performance with beta versions of Firefox 4 looking particularly nippy.