If you haven’t heard the news already, the Chrome team at Google has released Chrome version 36 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android (available “within the next few days”). The Google Chrome Releases blog provides a brief overview of some of the latest updates.
Chrome 36.0.1985.125 contains a number of fixes and improvements, including:
- Rich Notifications Improvements
- An Updated Incognito / Guest NTP design
- The addition of a Browser crash recovery bubble
- Chrome App Launcher for Linux
- Lots of under the hood changes for stability and performance
For Developers
Although not mentioned in the above blog post, it has been confirmed that Chrome 36 contains a variety of new and improved features aimed towards benefiting the web development community.
HUGE. Chrome 36 is now stable! ~300 million people will soon have *full* support for Web Components: pic.twitter.com/xiIQHF5wlI
— Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) July 16, 2014
In addition to full web components support, Chrome 36 contains support for un-prefixed CSS transforms and two exciting new javascript methods: Object.observe and element.animate().
Security Fixes
The Chrome team addressed two high level security vulnerabilities with this release, adding up to $5000 USD in bug bounties. The highest level bounty was a vulnerability that allowed for Omnibox URL Spoofing in Andoid, followed by another Android bug that allowed for Same origin policy bypassing.
To update to Chrome 36, navigate to chrome://chrome/
and click “Relaunch” when prompted. When ready, the Android version will be available on Google Play.
Have you had a play with the latest version? What’s your favorite feature?
Tim Evko is a front end web developer from New York, with a passion for responsive web development, Sass, and JavaScript. He lives on coffee, CodePen demos and flannel shirts.