Chrome 49 also adds support for smooth scrolling

Mar 3, 2016 14:55 GMT  ·  By

Google has released version 49 of its Chrome browser, which is mainly focused on fixing 26 security issues but has added some new user-facing features as well.

First things first, the most important updates to Chrome are the 26 security bugs that the company has fixed, 13 reported by independent security researchers, and 13 fixed in-house by the Chrome and V8 teams.

Of these 26 bugs, 11 are ranked of High severity, 10 of Medium severity, one as Low severity, while two bugs did not receive a severity ranking. As you can see, there are no Critical severity bugs, the highest danger level in Chrome's internal security bug ranking system.

Google paid $51,000 for all the Chrome 49 security bugs

Google has also revealed that it paid $36,500 (€33,500) for the 13 bugs reported by independent security researchers, but that it also dished out an additional $14,500 (€13,300) in bug bounty rewards to other researchers that helped the company smooth out bugs in the non-stable channels.

None of the bug rewards rival what Google paid last week to an anonymous security researcher, who discovered a critical bug in Chrome 48 and was awarded a prize of $25,633.70 (€23,090.3).

Some of the issues fixed in Chrome 49 are two same-origin bypasses (in Chrome's Blink engine and Pepper Plugin), three use-after-free bugs in Blink, a bad cast in Chrome's Extensions, an out-of-bounds issue in libpng, and an SRI validation bypass.

A list of bugs fixed by the Google team can be consulted on the Chromium project while the V8 team has also contributed their own fixes as well.

Smooth scrolling for the masses

As for the user-facing improvements, Google Chrome 49 adds smooth mouse scrolling functionality across all major desktop operating systems and the possibility that Chrome users enable a data saving feature and tell websites in advance that they want a lighter version of the page, if available.

Users can use Chrome's built-in updater to upgrade their browser, they can download the most recent version of Chrome from its homepage, or from Softpedia's Google Chrome download mirrors for Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.