Google announced today that the desktop iteration of Chrome version 58 has officially been promoted into the stable channel. This means that users with Windows, Mac, and 64-bit Linux computers who are using Chrome on the stable channel will be seeing their official update to version 58 in the very near future. The list of changes coming to stable channel users is a bit underwhelming, though there are some under the hood changes that should make things run a bit more smoothly. Notably, this particular release contains a whopping 29 security fixes, most of which were found by Google’s own security or through the use of security exploit finding bots.
The newest version of Chrome to make its way to the stable channel will bring mostly minor changes, with relatively few major user-facing tweaks. The way that browsing history is handled and displayed has been tweaked, and some under-the-hood tuning has happened, though on the desktop side, it’s quite minor. On the security side of things, the 12 that were found by external researchers managed to net them a collective $14,000. Of that, the biggest winner was Qihoo 360’s Guang Gong, who scored $3,000 for finding a type confusion bug in PDFium. Runner up Khalil Zhani found a bug with Print Preview that allowed the stack memory to be used after the function freed it up. That payout was matched by two researchers that found URL spoofing bugs that could potentially be used in social engineering attacks.
The full list of changes can be found in the official change log, but those who want a quick digest can wait a little while and give blog posts from the Chromium team and Google’s own Chrome team a read. The update should be hitting all applicable users within the next few weeks, and will happen automatically by default. Those on the stable channel may notice a slight bump in speed or lowering of memory usage in day to day use, but users on the Beta and Canary channels won’t be affected, as has been the case with Chrome and Chromium updates going to the stable channel in the past.