Google Chrome 17: more secure and faster browsing

The final version 17 of Google Chrome is available; promising faster browsing and safer downloads.

Google Chrome is racking up the version numbers. Google has now released the 17th stable version of their browser. At the end of 2011, Google CEO, Larry Page, announced that Google Chrome now had more than 200 million users and solid growth.

Google Chrome 17 offers a pre-loading technology adapted to the Omnibox (the address bar). When a user enters something into the Omnibox, Google Chrome starts loading pages as a background task. Via the Omnibox’s auto-complete mechanism, if a URL corresponds to a site that you may be interested in, Google Chrome will "start to pre-load the page", explains a Google software engineer.

In certain cases, this promises instant results (after confirmation of the auto-complete result by pressing the Enter key). The tests that have been performed though don’t always show great success.

An additional security layer has also been added to Google Chrome 17. It applies to executable files with the .exe and .msi extensions, with these only being applicable to Windows. A confrontation has taken place with a white list being developed containing known editors. If the file isn’t in this list, the URL will be sent to Google’s servers for analysis. If it is considered as potentially dangerous with a high number of malicious downloads, the user will receive an alert.

It should be noted that protection against phishing and malicious programs can now disabled in the Options with the confidentiality settings. In terms of security, progress has also been made in other fields as Google Chrome 17 has corrected twenty security vulnerabilities with one being critical. This is the second critical fault this year; a rare event for Google Chrome.

Download Google Chrome 17 (or use the internal update mechanism):

• Windows
• Mac OS X
• Linux