New Version of Chrome Boots and Runs Faster, Fixes Bugs

The Google Chrome team has released version 24 of the browser for Windows, the Mac and Linux. This is the first release with support for MathML (an application of XML for describing mathematical notations), and it also contains an update to Flash as well as improved JavaScript performance that coincides with Mozilla's release of a new JavaScript engine in the Firefox browser.  One of the first things that users will notice is that the browser now starts up much faster.

MathML may appeal to a limited audience, but it allows you to write mathematical notation that looks beautiful on the web. Among improvements likely to be appreciated by the wider audience, there is a speed improvemtent in Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine that arrives just as Mozilla has delivered its new Ion Monkey JavaScript engine in the new version of Firefox.

Chrome 24 also reportedly patches 24 vulnerabilities.  Computerworld has noted:

"Three of the vulnerabilities were reported to Google by a quartet of outside researchers, who received $6,000 for their efforts as part of the search company's bounty program. Two of the four were Facebook researchers who together earned $4,000 for uncovering and reporting a bug in Chrome's "same origin policy," a security provision intended to block browser-based languages, including JavaScript, hosted on one domain from running on another."

"Five of the flaws were 'use-after-free' bugs, a type of memory allocation vulnerability that Chrome's security engineers have become adept at finding; and four, including one of the use-after-free vulnerabilities, that affected the browser's built-in PDF viewer."

This just goes to show that Google's bug bounty program--which pays researchers and individuals who uncover browser bugs--is working.

If you already use Chrome, the automatic updater should take you to the new version 24, otherwise it's worth downloading this new release.