14 DAY TRIAL // Today, October 13, Google had the great pleasure of promoting its Google Chrome 46 web browser to the stable channel for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Apple's Mac OS X.
Based on the open-source Chromium 46 web browser, Google Chrome 46 (the actual version number is 46.0.2490.71) comes today as a free update for Windows, Mac, and Linux users and includes several security fixes, as well as various under-the-hood improvements.
Unfortunately, Google didn't publish any details about the new features implemented in Google Chrome 46, if any, at the moment of writing this article, so we can only assume that it's mainly a bugfix release that patches 24 security issues that have been discovered by various developers (see below for details).
"The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 46 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux," says Tina Zhou on behalf of the Google Chrome team. "Chrome 46.0.2490.71 contains a number of fixes and improvements -- a list of changes is available in the log."
Chrome 46 includes 24 security fixes
As mentioned above, Google Chrome 46.0.2490.71 contains 24 security fixes, among which we can mention a cross-origin bypass in the Blink engine, use-after-free issues in the ServiceWorker and PDFium components, an information leakage in LocalStorage, as well as a CORS bypass via CSS fonts.
Additionally, a bad-cast in the PDFium component has been fixed, a memory corruption was plugged from the FFMpeg multimedia backend, and an improper error handling was addressed in the libANGLE library. Google Chrome 46 also comes with several fixes from internal audits, as well as fixes for a number of critical vulnerabilities in the V8 engine.
You can download Google Chrome 46.0.2490.71 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia or update the web browser using its built-in updater utility.
Update: Earlier today, October 14, Google published details about the new features implemented in Chrome 46.0.2490.71, which are mainly related to the web browser's notifications.