Google Chrome 72 released

A new version of the most popular web browser, Google Chrome, released. Google Chrome 72 is now available for Windows, Linux, Mac and Android. Sporting a minimalist design, Chrome features a very powerful fast web rendering engine "Blink" to make your browsing experience faster, safer, and easier.

Google Chrome is the most popular web browser which exists for all major platforms like Windows, Android and Linux. It comes with a powerful rendering engine which supports all modern web standards.

Tip: Get 8 Thumbnails on New Tab Page in Google Chrome

Chrome 72.0.3626.81 contains a number of fixes and improvements, along with tons of changes in Web APIs and supported protocols. Here are the key changes in this release.

Remove HTTP-Based Public Key Pinning

HTTP-Based Public Key Pinning (HPKP) was intended to allow websites to send an HTTP header that pins one or more of the public keys present in the site's certificate chain. Unfortunately, it has very low adoption, and although it provides security against certificate misissuance, it also creates risks of denial of service and hostile pinning. For these reasons, this feature is being removed.

Remove rendering FTP resources

FTP is a non-securable legacy protocol. When even the Linux kernel is migrating off of it, it's time to move on. One step toward deprecation and removal is to deprecate rendering resources from FTP servers and instead download them. Chrome will still generate directory listings, but any non-directory listing will be downloaded rather than rendered in the browser.

Deprecate TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the protocol which secures HTTPS. It has a long history stretching back to the nearly twenty-year-old TLS 1.0 and its even older predecessor, SSL. Both TLS 1.0 and 1.1 have a number of weaknesses.

• TLS 1.0 and 1.1 use MD5 and SHA-1, both weak hashes, in the transcript hash for the Finished message.
• TLS 1.0 and 1.1 use MD5 and SHA-1 in the server signature. (Note: this is not the signature in the certificate.)
• TLS 1.0 and 1.1 only support RC4 and CBC ciphers. RC4 is broken and has since been removed. TLS’s CBC mode construction is flawed and was vulnerable to attacks.
• TLS 1.0’s CBC ciphers additionally construct their initialization vectors incorrectly.
• TLS 1.0 is no longer PCI-DSS compliant.

Supporting TLS 1.2 is a prerequisite to avoiding the above problems. The TLS working group has deprecated TLS 1.0 and 1.1. Chrome has now also deprecated these protocols. Removal is expected in Chrome 81 (early 2020).

Picture-in-Picture (PiP) is now enabled by default

Picture-in-Picture (PiP) is now enabled by default in Chrome for Linux, Mac, and Windows. This allows you to watch videos in a floating window (always on top of other windows) so that you can keep an eye on what you're watching while interacting with other sites, or applications. Note: the floating PiP window works when a web page is using the Picture-in-Picture API. For sites that doesn't support the mentioned API, you can use the following extension.

Download Links

Web installer: Google Chrome Web 32-bit | Google Chrome 64-bit
MSI/Enterprise installer: Google Chrome MSI Installers for Windows

Note: The offline installer doesn't support the automatic update feature of Chrome. By installing it this way, you will be forced to always update your browser manually.

Source: Google/Pete LePage