Google has officially released Chrome 50 to the stable channel with 20 security updates and bug fixes for Windows, Mac and Linux. The multi-million dollar giant has rewarded external researchers with $17,500 to help spot and fix the security errors.
With the auto-update mechanism on Chrome, a whole lot of devices would be updated to Chrome 50 in the coming week, making Chrome tread closer to the line of becoming the most-widely used desktop web browser in 2016, with almost 1 billion active users.
The security blanket of Chrome had two severe high risk bugs, for which Chrome has to shell out $12,500 to get them fixed. The most serious bug of all was an error in Universal cross site scripting(XSS) in extension bindings, and Google paid $7500 to an anonymous researcher.
Another serious bug was fixed with the help of Choongwoo Han, who discovered an out-of-bounds exception in the V8, which is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript engine. He was paid a hefty sum of $5000 for his contribution to the Chrome developer community.
Several other Medium and Low level security threats were fixed with the help of 6 other external researchers, who helped fix problems ranging from out-of-bounds memory usage, to prevention of leakage of sensitive information to malicious extensions and more.
The only sad thing about this Chrome update, Chrome has ended support for Windows Vista and XP, but I guess it is a good thing. Microsoft ended the support for these OS a long time ago, and they are more vulnerable to attacks.
This is one of the most stable Chrome updates, but lacks the material design changes that the users and developers all around the globe had been direly waiting for.
