Chrome 131 released with PDF, Google Lens, and Power efficiency improvements

Google Chrome 131 is now available to everyone. The release comes with several improvements. The  built-in PDF viewer can now do OCR for embedded images. Google Lens can now translate the text in images, and more.

What's new in Chrome 131

PDF viewer OCR

The built-in PDF viewer has enhanced its ability to recognize text in scanned PDF documents where the text appears as an image. Using the integrated optical character recognition (OCR) engine, which leverages machine learning, text is now recognized directly on the local system. Unlike earlier versions, scanned documents are automatically converted into a searchable, selectable text format, allowing for easy text selection, search, and copying to the clipboard.

Google Lens

The Google Lens image search feature, available through the context menu, now includes the ability to overlay translations onto images. The translated text appears directly on top of the original text in the image.

Performance improvements

• Added the "Performance Detection" tool, which identifies potential performance issues with the pages you are viewing and displays a notification with recommendations for solving the problem in one click. For example, to speed up the current tab, the browser may offer to deactivate other resource-consuming tabs.
• The ability to enable extended checks in the PartitionAlloc memory allocation system has been introduced , which allow blocking vulnerabilities caused by accessing already released memory areas (use-after-free). By default, these checks are disabled due to the possible negative impact on performance. However, for implementations where security is more important than performance, separate enterprise policies are now provided to enable additional protection.
• Chrome now comes with additional performance-related settings, such as the ability to specify sites that remain in active mode at all times (without slowing down in the background), select a method for visually indicating deactivated tabs, and display memory consumption in tab pop-up thumbnails.

Power Efficiency

• The gradual rollout of the new Energy Saver mode has begun. In this mode, tabs that consume significant CPU resources but aren’t playing sound and have been inactive for over 5 minutes are automatically frozen. The only exceptions are tabs related to managing external devices or conducting video/audio conferences. These tabs are identified based on their access to APIs for USB, Bluetooth, camera, input devices, microphone, or for managing communication channels through RTCDataChannel or MediaStreamTrack. You can manage the auto-freezing feature via the "chrome://flags/#freezing-on-energy-saver" flag.
• Added experimental memory saver modes - Moderate, Balanced and Maximum, allowing you to select a method for freeing up memory from inactive tabs. In Moderate mode, tab memory is deactivated only when there is a shortage of memory in the system, in Maximum mode, tabs are deactivated a short time after they become inactive, and in Balanced mode, inactive tabs are deactivated taking into account the free memory in the system.

Other

The built-in Chrome Root Store has stopped trusting the Entrust certification authority due to multiple violations of certification authority requirements , failure to meet deadlines for responding to problematic certificates, delays in certificate revocation, improperly filing incident reports, and failure to comply with the rules for issuing EV ( Extended Validation ) TLS certificates, which require verification of domain ownership documents and confirmation of resource ownership. Due to the lack of action to eliminate the identified deficiencies, TLS certificates issued by Entrust after November 11, 2024, are perceived in Chrome as untrusted. Certificates issued before November 11 continue to be perceived as normal.

Chrome for Android

• The Android version includes the ability to connect third-party providers for automatic form filling and password saving, not tied to the Accessibility API.
• The Android version makes it easier to connect to your Google account and manage data synchronization between different browsers. Synchronization is no longer presented as a separate feature in Settings, but is combined with the Google account connection feature, which allows you to use and save information such as passwords and bookmarks in your Google Account.

Security fixes

In addition to new features and improvements, the Chrome 131 closes 12 vulnerabilities . Many of the vulnerabilities were identified as a result of automated testing with the tools AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, Control Flow Integrity, LibFuzzer and AFL.

There were no critical problems that allow bypassing all levels of browser protection and executing code in the system outside the sandbox environment. One of the issues was assigned a high severity level.

As part of the program for paying cash rewards for detecting vulnerabilities for the current release, Google has paid out 8 rewards in the amount of 1 thousand US dollars (one reward is $ 1000). The amount of 7 rewards has not yet been determined.

The announcement is here.