A total of seven security vulnerabilities have been fixed in the release of which four have been classified as high and three as normal.

[$500] [39443] High Type confusion error with forms. Credit: kuzzcc.
[39698] High HTTP request error leading to possible XSRF. Credit: Meder Kydyraliev, Google Security Team.
[40136] Medium Local file reference through developer tools. Credit: Robert Swiecki, Google Security Team; Tavis Ormandy, Google Security Team.
[40137] Medium Cross-site scripting in chrome://net-internals. Credit: Robert Swiecki, Google Security Team; Tavis Ormandy, Google Security Team.
[40138] High Cross-site scripting in chrome://downloads. Credit: Robert Swiecki, Google Security Team; Tavis Ormandy, Google Security Team.
[40575] Medium Pages might load with privileges of the New Tab page.
[$500] [40635] High Memory corruption in V8 bindings. Credit: kuzzcc; Google Chrome Security Team (SkyLined); Michal Zalewski, Google Security Team.

Chrome users running a stable version can update the web browser by checking for updates in the About Google Chrome page after clicking on the tools icon in the browser’s toolbar. Users who want to try out the Chrome browser can download the latest version from the official website.

Linky is the first add-on for the Google Chrome browser that brings part of that functionality to the browser. The Google Chrome extension does not work exactly like the Firefox add-on which becomes problematic in several occasions.

Linky places an icon in the Google Chrome header. Pressing that icon will open all links that are currently highlighted by the user. Multi Links users will know that highlighting does not prove to be as effective as working with the rectangle simple because of the reason that highlighting will highlight everything on the page between the first and last selected link. This would mean for the Google Search results for example that all Cached and Similar pages would be opened as well which is usually not the intention of the user.

Linky works best when the links are placed next to each other without interfering elements. This is for example the case in sidebar menus. It is however not practical on all sites and the developer should consider switching to the implementation offered by Multi Links instead.

Linky can be downloaded at the official Google Chrome extensions repository over at the Google website.

ChromPass can be started from any location including removable drives which makes it an excellent password recovery tool. It will automatically fetch the information upon startup and display them in a list. Included in these information are the username, password, url and even the time the entry has been created.

The login details can be exported in various formats including html, csv or xml file.

The password recovery tool comes with an additional option to load the passwords from another user of the local computer, the logon password has to be supplied though to make this possible. One of the greatest security weaknesses is the lack of a master password. It would be impossible to use a tool like ChromePass if a master password would have been set.

Why would someone want to force SSL in the web browser? The answer is easy: To increase security. This is an excellent way to deal with most phishing threats. Phishing sites are currently copying the looks and feels of popular financial sites. What they do not do is to make use of the https protocol. This means that those phishing pages would not even be opened in Google Chrome as they are not making use of https.

Here is the idea. Create a Google Chrome profile that forces SSL and that is purely used for accessing sensitive sites. This could be PayPal, Gmail, other financial sites and basically any site that is making use of the https protocol.

The ability to force SSL is only available in the latest developer’s build of Google Chrome. Read the Google Chrome 2 release announcement article for information on how to obtain a copy.

The force SSL option has to be supplied as a parameter during startup. This can be done by appending –force-https to the Target row in the shortcut’s properties.

Does anyone know if there is a similar option for Firefox or Opera?

One interesting addition to the latest beta builds of the Google Chrome browser was basic Greasemonkey support. Since there is no way of adding extensions to Chrome yet users have to live with some limitations. Only scripts in c:\scripts are loaded and only if the user adds the parameter –enable-greasemonkey by appending it to the program’s shortcut.

There is another serious limitation. The scripts are not limited to a domain but will work on all domains which is usually handled by the @include metadata. The metadata part is ignored which could be problematic when loading some Greasemonkey scripts.

Greasemonkey support was added in build 3499 which is available from the Chromium build ftp. Support is also included in later builds including the latest Google Chrome 3601 build.

Google Chrome Backup is a tool that can backup, create, restore and delete Google Chrome profiles. A profile contains all the personal information of a user like bookmarks, the browsing history and the layout of the browser.

It is actually no problem to backup Google Chrome profiles manually by copying all files stored in the Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\User Data folders to another location. Google Chrome Backup on the other hand provides an easier method of backing up the files with the click of a button in the program interface.

One interesting aspect of Google Chrome Backup is that it can also create profiles for the browser. Those profiles can be enhanced with startup parameters like starting the browser maximized, disabling the popup blocker or enabling file cookies.

Google Chrome Backup is a nice backup tool to create backups of Google Chrome profiles. For those wondering about the difference between Google Chrome and Chromium. That’s a bit confusing but it seems that Chromium is the Open Source version of Google Chrome.

Donation Coder user Dirhael developed a simple application that checks for new nightly builds of Google Chrome and download them automatically for the user.

The nightly builds checker is a portable application that can be executed from any location. The tool provides two main buttons: The first button checks for the latest nightly build version of Google Chrome on the Google server and the download button downloads that version if the user decides to click the button. The latest version that has been downloaded using the application is listed in the application so that the user can compare the versions before downloading.

The build status is also listed in the application which provides information if the latest build did pass all unit tests. The nightly builds of Google Chrome can be run from the location that they have been unpacked into which means that no installation is required.

Google sent out a 38-paged comic book illustrated by Scott McCloud to selected individuals which is entitled Google Chrome – Behind the Open Source browser project. The complete comic can be accessed at the Google Blogoscoped website. The comic is showing real Google employees and their thoughts, ideas and functions in the browser project.

It begins by outlining the basic concepts of a browser as Google sees it. A browser should be stable, a lot faster, more secure, clean, simple, efficient and Open Source. Google Chrome will make use of multiple processes which means that each tab is rendered separately which includes Javascript. This means that if one process in one tab crashes because of a bug then only this tab will go down but the rest of the browser will remain stable. Microsoft introduced that feature in Internet Explorer 8 as well.

One of the most interesting features of Google Chrome is a task manager like application for the browser that displays the memory usage of each tab and detailed information for each tab as well which makes it easy to identify the resource that is using up most of the memory.

A V8 Javascript engine was created for Google Chrome which promises an incredible performance boost over current Javascript engines while being memory efficient using better garbage collection. The address bar is called Omnibox in Google Chrome and each tab will use its Omnibox which can do anything the Firefox Awesome Bar can do. It will support intelligent unobtrusive autocomplete and capture search boxes from Internet sites locally if they are used.

Speaking about creating a new tab. Just yesterday I mentioned a Firefox extension that would open an individual website instead of a blank page. Google Chrome makes use of the same concept by displaying the nine most visited websites plus searches on those pages.

Google Chrome will make use of a privacy function just like Microsoft’s InPrivat feature in Internet Explorer 8. Sandboxing is introduced to protect the system.

There is so much information on this 38 pages. It is obvious that the Google Chrome development team took a look at Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera borrowing any good ideas that those browser came up with and added their ideas to the mix. This could be a huge thing.

The browser will be available at google.com/chrome which currently displays a 404 error.