Google released a new stable release of its Chrome web browser today, which brings improvements in security, privacy, and graphics.
With regards to security, Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology has received some enhancements. It now warns users before they download some types of malicious files. “We’ve carefully designed this feature so that malicious content can be detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download,” writes software engineer Adrienne Walker on Google’s Chrome Blog.
In terms of privacy, Google says Chrome now gives you more control over data that sites store on your computer, by way of Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects. Google has worked with Adobe to integrate deletion of these objects directly into Chrome.
In the graphics department, there is support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, catering to 3D effets on websites that implement them. That’s where the above image of the sheep comes from. You can check out the Chrome experiment with those sheep here, which displays how it looks, and how you can interact with the site.
The experiment is “Shaun the Sheep,” and lets you use controls to expand and shrink the video, rotate the scene, bring up a rotating carousel of videos, and turn on puddle reflection.
Google says Chrome has 160 million users. They should all be getting automatically updated to the latest version within the coming days. Google also reminds us of its six-week release schedule, and promises “many more improvements” to come.