Chrome 12 adds a raft of new features

SOFTWARE HOUSE Google has released Chrome 12, adding plenty of new features to its minimalist web browser and fixing a number of security vulnerabilities.

Having been tested in beta, the stable version of Chrome 12 has hardware accelerated 3D CSS enabled, which developers can take advantage of to implement 3D effects. There is also a new safe browsing mode that Google says offers protection against downloading malicious files, and a much-trumpeted ability to delete Flash cookies within Chrome.

Google software engineer Adrienne Walker said of the safe browsing mode, "We've carefully designed this feature so that malicious content can be detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download."

Other new features include the ability to launch apps by name from the Omnibox, integrated sync into new settings pages, improved screen readers support, and for Mac users a warning when you happen to press Command-Q, which usually loses all your web pages. It also gets rid of Google Gears, a feature with functions that have been made redundant by web standards like HTML5.

The release of a newer browser version isn't complete without some security fixes, and Chrome 12 patched 14 security vulnerabilities, rated from low to high risk. Some won security researchers cash rewards, with the highest prize of over $3,000 given to a fellow called Sergey Glazunov.

Google's Jason Kersey said of Glazunov's bug bounty, "Although the linked bug is not of critical severity, it was accompanied by a beautiful chain of lesser severity bugs which demonstrated critical impact." µ