Chrome has been receiving a good number of new features with each update lately, mainly under-the-hood fixes and API fixes that are meant to cater more to developers than users. Chrome is also working toward supporting newer protocols, upping security and dropping support for insecure or outdated protocols on both the security and content delivery ends. The newest update to hit the stable channel, Chrome 49, is no different, bringing a swath of new features for developers with just one user-facing feature. On the user side, the update enables smooth scrolling by default, rather than having to enable it manually, leaving users with a smoother and faster experience when scrolling through pages. Other fixes were mostly on the development and bug-fix or security fronts.
On the security side of things, Google wound up paying out $14,500 in rewards for contributions from outside of Google. Some services that got patched up by those outside of Google’s own employee force are Blink, Pepper Plugin, Extensions, libpng, Skia, WebAPI, WebRTC and Favicons. Outside contributions included, a grand total of 26 security fixes went into Chrome 49 before it hit the stable channel. Some fixes are still in the works, however, and won’t be disclosed to the public until they’ve been patched. Things like memory leaks, vulnerabilities and bypasses populated the rap sheet for the bugs squashed in the newest update, among other issues.
The total number and details of other fixes and optimizations was undisclosed in the release announcement, though it was implied that the update mostly fixed things up under the hood, fine-tuning some services and providing a lot of friendly touches for developers. For the full list of changes, a changelog is available that will show all of the details of the newest update. The update is already live for Windows, Linux and Mac, but a timeline for release on other platforms was not announced. An update to version 49 for Android is implied to be in the works and available soon, however. For the full announcement, complete with a changelog that shows all of the security fixes and under-the-hood updates present in Chrome 49, hit up the source link.