Google started the rollout of the web browser Google Chrome 65 for desktop and mobile systems earlier today.

The release post on the official Chrome Releases blog does not reveal much about changes, improvements or new features but an hour-long combing through of the official changelog revealed several interesting changes in Chrome 65.

Desktop users can load chrome://settings/help to run a manual check for updates. Chrome should pick up the new version, 65.0.3325.146, on page load. The situation is different on Android where the new release is rolled out gradually to devices.

Chrome 65

One of the new features of Google Chrome 65 is a new tab-under blocking mechanism designed to prevents sites from abusing clicks on links. Google demonstrated two abuse cases in October 2017 where sites would load a URL after a link click in a new tab and change the URL of the source page to a different address at the same time.

Tab unders are used by malicious actors, spammers and also for advertising purposes. What made them interesting up until now was that Chrome's built-in popup blocker did not block them.

Chrome 65 includes another security related improvement. The browser ignores the presence of download attributes on anchor elements with cross-origin attributes to protect against cross-origin information leakage.

Chrome 65 supports the TLS 1.3 draft-23 version.

Google revealed some development-related changes back in February when it announced the upgrade of the beta channel of the browser to version 65. Google added support for the Server Timing API and CSS Paint API to the browser as well.

Other changes
  • Add chrome://flags#enable-webauthentication to enable support for PublicKeyCredentials in
  • CredentialManager
  • Add chrome://flags/#ignore-previews-blacklist to "ignore decisions made by the PreviewsBlackList.
  • Add chrome://flags/#show-autofill-type-predictions to show autofill predictions.
  • Add chrome://flags/#enable-downloads-location-change to change the downloads location on Android.
  • Disable fullscreen for mixed content pages on iOS.
  • Removed compact translate UI flag.
  • The Network Panel displays previews for all HTML responses (again)

Chrome 65 is a security update for the Chrome web browser. Google fixed a total of 45 different security issues in the Chrome web browser: all security fixes are listed on the Chrome releases blog linked above.

Closing Words

It is recommended to upgrade to Chrome 65 as soon as possible as it includes important security fixes and improvements.