Confession: After about a month of using the trendy new Vivaldi browser, I returned to Chrome on my desktop, chastened and humbled. It all would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the former’s tendency to trip up when dragging tabs into new browsers. Anyway, for those who’ve stayed faithful to Google’s browser-slash-mass-advertising-and-surveillance program, version 104 includes no less than 27 new security fixes you’ll want right away.
Most of the bugs were spotted and submitted by non-Google members of the Chromium team, which submit changes to the open source version of the browser that Google then implements in the main version of Chrome. Security researchers hunting for these vulnerabilities can rake in some respectable dough in via Google’s rewards program. The top prize for version 104 went to an anonymous contributor who spotted a head corruption bug in the Omnibox behavior, netting them a cool $10,000 USD prize.
The new version is headed for the stable channel now, so you should see it update automatically over the next few days unless you’re running a Beta or newer version of Chrome. If you can’t wait that long, click the primary menu button, then “Help” and “About Google Chrome.” The update process should start right away. A relaunch will apply the changes.