Google Chrome currently accounts for more than 60% of the market. Previously, Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser surpassed the Mozilla Firefox browser to rank second. The new Microsoft Chromium version of the Edge browser is upgraded very quickly, and many features can be quickly added.
At present, it is very important to update to the latest version of Google Chrome, because Google fixed a vulnerability in the 88.0.4324.150 browser version released on Thursday and claimed that the vulnerability is being widely used. This update is rolling out now across Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Google isn’t providing specific details about the CVE-2021-21148 vulnerability “until a majority of users are updated with a fix.” But ZDNet notes that the date Google says the bug was reported on (January 24th) is just one day before Google’s Threat Analysis Group publicly disclosed a hacking campaign that appeared to be relying, in part, on an unpatched vulnerability in Chrome. It said government-backed hackers based in North Korea had set up a blog to lure their targets to, which would infect their machines even if they were running fully-patched software.
Regardless of which bug is being patched, ensuring that you are running the latest version of Chrome is more important than usual. Although the browser update process is basically automatic, you can speed up the update in the “About Google Chrome” menu.
In addition to the above updates, Chrome 88 is still worth upgrading. The new version of the browser is faster in startup and response speed, and the CPU usage has dropped significantly. For example, it provides features such as forward and backward caching. It claims to start up 25% faster, load pages 7% faster, CPU usage is reduced by 5 times, and can add 1.25 hours of battery life.
In other words, Chrome 88 will greatly throttle the Java timer operations in the background tab to improve performance and reduce CPU and RAM usage.
In any case, Chrome users can immediately go to chrome://settings/help to check whether their version is the latest Chrome 88.0.4324.150, and pay more attention to whether other Chromium-based browsers have corresponding updates.
