The Chrome browser differs from Chromium in its use of the Google logos
The launch of the new version of the popular web browser "Google Chrome 118" has been announced, a version in which preparations have begun to eliminate the use of third-party cookies and which are used to track user movements between sites in advertising network code, social media widgets and web analytics systems.
In Chrome 118 the changes made promote the use of the Privacy Sandbox initiative, which aims to achieve a compromise between users' need to maintain privacy and the desire of advertising networks and sites to track visitor preferences.
Another new feature presented in Chrome 118 is the compatibility with ECH mechanism (Encrypted Client Hello) is enabled for all users. With this ECH change comes to replace ESNI and it is mentioned that the key difference between ECH and ESNI is that instead of encrypting at the level of individual fields, ECH encrypts the entire TLS ClientHello message, which allows blocking leaks through fields that ESNI does not cover.
Regarding security improvements, now the telemetry sent to Google servers Collects data to identify malicious activities and policy violations in plugins.
In addition, when advanced browser protection is enabled, on Google's side, supports deep scanning of ZIP and RAR files encrypted (for this the user is asked for a decompression password, after which the content is sent to Google servers for scanning).
Also notable is that new text has been added to the “Privacy and Configurator Guide” to explain safe browsing protection levels and links have been added to related articles with additional information. In addition, a real-time security verification of open URLs is implemented, based on the transmission of partial hashes of the URLs opened by the user to Google servers. To prevent the user's IP address and hash from matching, the data is transmitted through an intermediate proxy.
In Chrome 118, Improved the layout of pages displayed when trying to open a site that was deemed unsafe when scanned using the “Safe Browsing” mechanism, in addition to adding information about the availability of discounts to the Missions section. The discount indicator may also appear in the address bar when opening pages with products from online stores crawled by Google.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Removed the need for the user to first enable the ability to display dialog boxes to request and confirm payments.
- ASCII character representation stopped decoding
- Added the ability to place text vertically on web form elements: selection, meter, progress, button, text area, and input.
- Added @scope CSS rule, which binds CSS styles taking into account the proximity of the style definition to elements.
- Added support for media query (@media) “scripting”, which allows checking the availability of scripting capabilities (for example, in CSS you can determine whether JavaScript support is enabled).
- Added support for querying reduced transparency media, which allows determining a change in the system configuration responsible for reducing the use of transparency or translucency effects.
Last but not least, in Chrome 118 20 vulnerabilities were eliminated, of which the critical vulnerability CVE-2023-5218 associated with memory access after free (Use After Free) in the site isolation mechanism is highlighted. The vulnerability allows you to bypass all levels of browser protection and execute code on the system outside of the sandbox environment.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details of this new release in the following link.
How to install Google Chrome 118 on Linux?
If you are interested in being able to install this new version of this web browser and you still do not have it installed, You can visit the following publication where we teach you how to install it on some Linux distributions.