Chromium 37 Launches With Major Security Fixes, 64-bit Windows Support 113
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.
Video decoding regression (Score:4, Informative)
> 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 [google.com], 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.
Re:Sweet (Score:0, Informative)
I hope the Firefox team once copies one sane feature from Chrome to their browser: the 64bit windows build.
Here you go. [mozilla.org]
Re:Why not a master password for the PW manager? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does it self-update to 64-bit? (Score:4, Informative)