Tag: cve (Page 7 of 21)

This week, Google released the first 78 version in the “stable” channel of their Chromium sources – the basis of Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi and even the Edge browsers, and of course the Chromium open-source browser itself. The release notes contain a fairly long list of security issues (CVE’s) which were taken care of.

I built packages for you today, so that you can enjoy the latest&greatest Chromium browser on Slackware 14.2 or -current.

What’s new in Chromium 78?

• Tab hover cards. If you have a multitude of browser tabs open, it becomes difficult to recognize which tab has what page open. From now on, if you move your mouse over a tab you will see a small ‘hover card’ showing the title and the hostname of the page you have open in there.
• Dark mode. You can now force ‘dark mode’ on every web site, whether the web site supports it or not. The web site code is not changed at all, and Chromium will perform a smart color inversion. You can choose between several algorithms. This is an experimental feature still, so you will have to enable it via chrome://flags like so:

  chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark

• Chrome Password Safety tool which was available as an extension since February of this year has now been folded into the core of the browser. This feature will inform you of weak, leaked or re-used passwords in your list of saved passwords. Later on, Google is going to add functionality that will warn you when you try to use a password which is leaked online – even if you do not save your passwords in the browser.
  Still an experimental feature in this version of Chromium, you will have to enable it first via chrome://flags:

  chrome://flags/#password-leak-detection

• A new extended menu which appears if you click “customize” in the lower right corner of the ‘new tab‘ page. Decorate the ‘new tab’ with your own background image or a different theme. This is still an experimental functionality so you have to enable it explicitly via chrome://flags :

  chrome://flags/#ntp-customization-menu-v2
  chrome://flags/#chrome-colors

• Just missed the deadline for Chrome 78:
  DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH): Google has started a field test of its newly developed technology to tunnel your DNS queries through regular HTTPs requests. This security feature will be invaluable to those of you who do not want to risk 3rd parties to sniff your DNS requests for instance on a public Wi-Fi network. It will also prevent potential DNS spoofing attacks.
  This  Google blog article about DoH explains the caveats of using their implementation and the difference with the Mozilla Firefox implementation of DoH. Firefox enables DoH by ecapsulating your DNS requests in HTTPs and sending those to a CloudFlare server, while Chrome honours your existing DNS configuration (like paternal controls and safe browsing). The Chrome browser will check if your DNS provider is among a list of DoH-compatible providers, and swiches to your DNS provider’s equivalent DoH service. If the DNS provider isn’t in the list, Chrome will keep using regular DNS requests. Therefore, you’ll have to actively check whether this feature is going to work for you.
  As said, that same blog page mentions that this feature did not make Chrome 78 at the last moment.
  Also good to know is that the field trial is only going to be enabled for a small percentage of Chrome users (and not on Linux or iOS at all) – once it gets enabled. Not sure if this is going to be available to all of us Linux Chromium users any time soon.

Enjoy the new browser release!

Eric