Chrome 51.0.2704.63 is now available for Linux, Mac, Windows

May 25, 2016 21:00 GMT  ·  By

Google has just released a new stable version of its popular Chrome web browser for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, Google Chrome 51.0.2704.63.

As usual, Google has patched a lot of security vulnerabilities that were discovered by various researchers during the entire development cycle of the Google Chrome 51 browser (see below for details), but there are also a couple of new features to get excited about in Chrome 51.

The first one is the implementation of a new API (Application Programming Interface), called Credential Management, which promises to enrich the built-in password manager by allowing websites to interact directly with it, as well as to access federated account services like Google Smart Lock, thus offering Chrome users a much-improved website login experience.

Also new in today's Google Chrome 51.0.2704.63 release is a technology that promises to reduce the power consumption by up to 30% when displaying websites that contain all sorts of social widgets and embedded streams, which eat lots of resources, by reducing the overhead of offscreen rendering.

Google patches 42 security issues in Chrome 51.0.2704.63

As mentioned before, Google Chrome 51.0.2704.63 arrives today all patched up for the latest security vulnerabilities, and the release notes published earlier by Krishna Govind highlight the improvements contributed by external researchers, whom Google awarded for their hard work.

There are a total of 42 security fixes in Chrome 51.0.2704.63 for various issues, among which we can mention cross-origin bypasses in the Blink engine and extension bindings, out-of-bounds read in PDFium, as well as a heap overflow and a type confusion in the V8 JavaScript Engine.

Several out-of-bounds read and access issues have also been fixed in the libxslt XSLT C library developed for the GNOME project and used for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, and it looks like an information leak that affected Chrome extensions has been patched as well.

Google Chrome 51.0.2704.63 binaries are now available for download for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux operating systems, but you can update your Chrome installation right now via the built-in updater. Don't forget to restart the web browser to apply the update. Chrome 51 is also coming soon to Chrome OS and Android.