Chrome 74.0.3729.131 Released
Rhonda Brazler
Hi, everyone! We've just released Chrome 120 (120.0.6099.43) for Android to a small percentage of users. It'll become available on Google Play over the next few days. You can find more details about early Stable releases here.
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox.[16] Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, and also for Android, where it is the default browser.[17] The browser is also the main component of ChromeOS, where it serves as the platform for web applications.
The release announcement was originally scheduled for September 3, 2008, and a comic by Scott McCloud was to be sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features within the new browser.[29] Copies intended for Europe were shipped early and German blogger Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped made a scanned copy of the 38-page comic available on his website after receiving it on September 1, 2008.[30][31] Google subsequently made the comic available on Google Books,[32] and mentioned it on their official blog along with an explanation for the early release.[33] The product was named "Chrome" as an initial development project code name, because it is associated with fast cars and speed. Google kept the development project name as the final release name, as a "cheeky" or ironic moniker, as one of the main aims was to minimize the user interface chrome.[34][35]
The browser was first publicly released, officially as a beta version,[36] on September 2, 2008, for Windows XP and newer, and with support for 43 languages, and later as a "stable" public release on December 11, 2008. On that same day, a CNET news item drew attention to a passage in the Terms of Service statement for the initial beta release, which seemed to grant to Google a license to all content transferred via the Chrome browser.[37] This passage was inherited from the general Google terms of service.[38] Google responded to this criticism immediately by stating that the language used was borrowed from other products, and removed this passage from the Terms of Service.[15]
Chrome quickly gained about 1% usage share.[33][39][40] After the initial surge, usage share dropped until it hit a low of 0.69% in October 2008. It then started rising again and by December 2008, Chrome again passed the 1% threshold.[41] In early January 2009, CNET reported that Google planned to release versions of Chrome for OS X and Linux in the first half of the year.[42] The first official Chrome OS X and Linux developer previews were announced on June 4, 2009,[43] with a blog post saying they were missing many features and were intended for early feedback rather than general use.[44] In December 2009, Google released beta versions of Chrome for OS X and Linux.[45][46] Google Chrome 5.0, announced on May 25, 2010, was the first stable release to support all three platforms.[47]
On January 11, 2011, the Chrome product manager, Mike Jazayeri, announced that Chrome would remove H.264 video codec support for its HTML5 player, citing the desire to bring Google Chrome more in line with the currently available open codecs available in the Chromium project, which Chrome is based on.[53] Despite this, on November 6, 2012, Google released a version of Chrome on Windows which added hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding.[54] In October 2013, Cisco announced that it was open-sourcing its H.264 codecs and would cover all fees required.[55]
In June 2015, the Debian developer community discovered that Chromium 43 and Chrome 43 were programmed to download the Hotword Shared Module, which could enable the OK Google voice recognition extension, although by default it was "off". This raised privacy concerns in the media.[182][183] The module was removed in Chrome 45, which was released on September 1, 2015, and was only present in Chrome 43 and 44.[184][185]
On July 22, 2010, Google announced it would ramp up the speed at which it releases new stable versions; the release cycles were shortened from quarterly to six weeks for major Stable updates.[222] Beta channel releases now come roughly at the same rate as Stable releases, though approximately one month in advance, while Dev channel releases appear roughly once or twice weekly, allowing time for basic release-critical testing.[223] This faster release cycle also brought a fourth channel: the "Canary" channel, updated daily from a build produced at 09:00 UTC from the most stable of the last 40 revisions.[224] The name refers to the practice of using canaries in coal mines, so if a change "kills" Chrome Canary, it will be blocked from migrating down to the Developer channel, at least until fixed in a subsequent Canary build.[225] Canary is "the most bleeding-edge official version of Chrome and somewhat of a mix between Chrome dev and the Chromium snapshot builds". Canary releases run side by side with any other channel; it is not linked to the other Google Chrome installation and can therefore run different synchronization profiles, themes, and browser preferences. This ensures that fallback functionality remains even when some Canary updates may contain release-breaking bugs.[226] It does not natively include the option to be the default browser, although on Windows and OS X it can be set through System Preferences. Canary was Windows-only at first; an OS X version was released on May 3, 2011.[227]
Support for Google Chrome on Windows XP and Windows Vista ended in April 2016.[289] The last release of Google Chrome that can be run on Windows XP and Windows Vista was version 49.0.2623.112,[290] released on April 7, 2016,[291] then re-released on April 11, 2016.[292]
In September 2008, Google released a large portion of Chrome's source code as an open-source project called Chromium. This move enabled third-party developers to study the underlying source code and to help port the browser to the macOS and Linux operating systems. The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the permissive BSD license.[338] Other portions of the source code are subject to a variety of open-source licenses.[339] Chromium is similar to Chrome, but lacks built-in automatic updates and a built-in Flash player, as well as Google branding and has a blue-colored logo instead of the multicolored Google logo.[340][341] Chromium does not implement user RLZ tracking.[191][186][342] Initially, the Google Chrome PDF viewer, PDFium, was excluded from Chromium, but was later made open-source in May 2014.[343][344] PDFium can be used to fill PDF forms.[345]
Some server configurations might cause issues, for example, if different content is served via HTTP and HTTPS. Users can bypass the automatic upgrading by explicitly navigating to an http:// URL in the Omnibox, or by changing the Insecure Content site setting to enabled, accessible via Page Info and chrome://settings/content. You can control this behavior with the HttpsUpgradesEnabled policy, and allowlist specific sites with the HttpAllowlist policy.
In the long term, you should ensure that your organization's servers support HTTPS and serve the same content on both HTTP and HTTPS. If you don't intend to support HTTPS (for example, on an intranet behind a firewall), servers shouldn't respond to port 443, and firewalls should close the connection rather than leave it hanging. You can test HTTPS upgrading in your environment by enabling chrome://flags#https-upgrades. If you come across any issues, you can report them to us.
A new review panel will be added in chrome://extensions which will appear whenever there are potentially unsafe extensions that need the user's attention. The initial launch will highlight extensions that are malware, policy violating or are no longer available in the Chrome Web Store. The user can choose to remove or keep these extensions.
The new icon is scheduled to launch in Chrome 117 as part of a general design refresh for desktop platforms. Chrome will continue to alert users when their connection is not secure. You can see the new tune icon now in Chrome Canary if you enable Chrome Refresh 2023 at chrome://flags#chrome-refresh-2023, but keep in mind this flag enables work that is still actively in-progress and under development, and does not represent a final product.
The release channels for chrome range from the most stable and tested (Stablechannel) to completely untested and likely least stable (Canary channel). Youcan run all channels alongside all others, as they do not share profiles withone another. This allows you to play with our latest code, while still keeping atested version of Chrome around.
Note: Early access releases (Canary builds and Dev and Beta channels) willbe only partly translated into languages other than English. Text related to newfeatures may not get translated into all languages until the feature is releasedin the Stable channel.
So there's often a short lag between the latest version of Chrome Browser being released and then the corresponding version of Chrome OS also being released. In that short window of time (usually only a few days), you might have the latest version of Chrome OS (no updates are available), but in the mean time the next version of Chrome Browser has been released.
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