Google Chrome is a closed source web browser developed by Google, although derived from an open source project called "Chromium".
A few days ago it was announced Chrome 123 new version release and in this new version Google presents improvements to tools for web developers, as well as changes in CSS and Web API, as well as bug fixes.
The new version fixes previously discovered bugs, eliminates 12 vulnerabilities, including a major vulnerability (CVE-2024-2625) in the V8 JavaScript engine that poses a high risk to the browser.
Main novelties of Chrome 123
In this new version that is presented of Chrome 123, a new continuity system between the web version and the mobile version, which allows the user to easily find open tabs on their different devices, this by a section that shows links to recently opened tabs on other devices linked to the same Google account.
Another improvement that this new version presents is the support for the Zstandard (zstd) compression algorithm which generates several specific benefits for the user along with gzip, brotli and deflate algorithms to encode content. These benefits include reducing page load times, optimizing connection bandwidth, and reducing required CPU resources.
In addition to this, the enhanced browser protection (Safe Browsing > Enhanced Protection) which sends information to Google about sites displaying extended privilege requests, displaying warnings if matches are found with an external database of malicious content.
In Chrome 123, Google introduces a new feature that makes it easier to unsubscribe from website notifications. This is useful in cases of accidental subscription to notifications, allowing users to easily opt out of constant updates from a particular site.
Moreover, Generative AI features have been expanded such as Tab Organizer or Create Themes to more users, since in Chrome 122, they were initially limited to adult users in the United States and had to be enabled manually. In Chrome 123, some of these features are turned on by default for certain users in the United States.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Added an API that allows you to exclude JavaScript execution and interceptions by ServiceWorkers when requesting resources that meet specific conditions.
- Warnings are now displayed when a page sends requests to the internal network outside of a secure context and has not been proactively verified.
- The Theora codec implementation has been removed from Chrome.
- Backwards compatibility up to Chrome 82 has been discontinued for the settings, history, and bookmarks synchronization service (Chrome Sync).
- An API has been added to diagnose the responsiveness of the site interface and identify bottlenecks during rendering.
- General improvements have been made to web developer tools in Chrome.
Finally If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link.
How to update or install Chrome on Ubuntu and derivatives?
If you are able to update your browser to the new version, you should know that you can do so by following the instructions 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