Google Chrome is a closed source web browser developed by Google, although derived from an open source project called "Chromium".
A few days ago the launch of the new version of Chrome 118 was announced, a version in which a large number of changes and improvements are presented that are intended to improve the user experience, as well as security and improvements for the tools. Web development.
In this new version of Chrome 118 that is presented, one of its main new features is the ssupport for ECH mechanism (Encrypted Client Hello), which is enabled for all users.
Another new feature presented in Chrome 118 is the Improves the way Safe Browsing settings are displayed, making it clearer what level of protection you are using and what results in both the “Security Settings” and the “Privacy Guide”. The update adds a new table to the enhanced protection level that is supposed to make it easier to understand what trade-offs are involved when choosing which options.
On the part of the improvements in Chrome 118 Web Developer Tools, now provided a warning when sending cookies that are subject to future blocking, in addition to adding a command line option “–test-third-party-cookie-phaseout” and a setting “chrome://flags/#test-third-party-cookie-phaseout” to force the enablement of the blocking for testing purposes.
As well Improvements have been made to the capabilities of the "Sources" panel, in which, instead of the “File System” section, a “Workspace” tab is offered, through which you can synchronize changes added through the development tools with the source files. In addition to this, it is now possible to change the order of the tabs in the Fonts panel by moving them with the mouse in drag and drop mode.
In the Elements panel, on the Styles tab, a separate section has been added for custom properties, allowing you to define your own CSS properties without running JavaScript. Search results now show all matches in a string, not just the first, which is useful when searching for JavaScript files that have been packed to reduce size.
The "transform-box" CSS property now supports stroke box, content box, and border box values, allowing you to change how the reference area is calculated for transform operations, for example to implement advanced graphic effects.
Added the ability to set focus on scroll blocks when browsing using the keyboard (for example, focus on scrolling can be set by pressing the Tab key and scrolling with the cursor keys).
Among other things Chrome 118 includes fixes for 20 vulnerabilities, including 14 reported by external researchers. The most serious of the externally reported flaws is CVE-2023-5218, a critical bug described as a use-after-free issue in Site Isolation, which allows bypassing all levels of browser protection and execute code on the system outside of the sandbox environment.
As part of the cash bounty program for discovering vulnerabilities for the current version, Google says it has awarded more than $30.000 in bug bounties to researchers who reported them.
Finally If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link.
How to update or install Google Chrome in Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those who are interested in being able to update to the new version of the browser on their systems, they can do so by following the instructions that we share below. The first thing you should do is check if the update is already available, for this you have to go to chrome: // settings / help and the notification that there is an update will appear.
In case it is not so you must close your browser and you are going to open a terminal and type:
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
Again, open your browser and it should have already been updated or the update notification will appear.
In case you want to install the browser or choose to download the deb package to update, we must go to the web page of the browser to obtain the deb package and to be able to install it in our system with the help of the package manager or from the terminal. The link is this.
Once the package is obtained, we only have to install with the following command:
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb