Google on Tuesday promoted the Chrome 60 web browser to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including Windows, macOS, and GNU/Linux, adding numerous security fixes and various improvements.
Initially pushed to the Beta channel earlier today, the Google Chrome 60.0.3112.78 update was seeded to the stable channel a few hours later, and it's now the most advanced stable version of the popular, cross-platform web browser. Users are recommended to update to Chrome 60.0.3112.78 immediately after reading this article.
As for the major improvements that Google implemented in this major update, we can mention that the Payment Request API is now supported, on the Android platform, it's now possible to use the VP9 open and royalty-free video coding format with the MP4 (ISO BMFF) container, and there's a new VP9 string format available.
Starting in Chrome 60, Google has deprecated the use of a custom fetch() function for accessing stored passwords, in an attempt to make the Credential Management API easier to use for developers. In addition, Chrome now supports the CSS @font-face descriptor, the corresponding CSS font-display property, and a new Paint Timing API.
"While no generalized metric perfectly captures when a page is loaded in all cases, First Paint and First Contentful Paint are invaluable numbers to measure critical user moments during loading. To give developers better insight into their site’s loading performance, the new Paint Timing API exposes metrics that capture First Paint and First Contentful Paint," reads the Chromium blog.
Chrome 60 fixes 40 security issues
Google Chrome 60 also fixes a total of 40 security issues, including use after free bugs in IndexedDB, V8, and PPAPI, a UI spoofing in the Blink engine, a type confusion in extensions, out-of-bounds write issues in PDFium and PPAPI, a user information leak via Android intents, as well as an out-of-bounds read in Skia.
It also patches three URL spoofing bugs in OmniBox, a use after free in Chrome Apps, an uninitialized use in Skia, a UI spoofing in browser, a pointer disclosure in SQLite, a user information leak via SVG, a type confusion in PDFium, a UI spoofing in the payments dialog, and another UI spoofing in the browser.
More details about these security fixes can be found in the release announcement, and you can download Google Chrome 60.0.3112.78 binaries for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our website. Chrome 60 is a recommended update for all users running Chrome 59 or a previous release.
