Google Patches 30 Chrome Bugs, Adds Instant Pages 103
JohnBert writes "Google patched 30 vulnerabilities in Chrome, paying out the third-highest bounty total ever for the bugs that outsiders filed with its security team. The company packaged the patches with an update to Chrome 13, adding Instant Pages to the 'stable' channel of the browser. The feature, which Google earlier tucked into Chrome 13 previews, proactively pre-loads some search results to speed up browsing. Google last upgraded Chrome's stable build in early June. Like Mozilla, which this year shifted to a rapid-release schedule, Google produces an update about every six-to-eight weeks. Fourteen of the 30 vulnerabilities patched were rated 'high,' the second-most-serious ranking in Google's four-step scoring system, while nine were pegged 'medium' and the remaining seven were labeled 'low.'"
Re:Instant Pages? (Score:3, Informative)
As far as i understood, Instant Pages not only prefetch the top-hit in your search, but also renders the page in background. Didn't find any original anouncement from google, but here you can read some more about it http://www.ecreativeim.com/blog/2011/06/google-announces-chrome-only-instant-pages/ [ecreativeim.com] .
Print Preview - Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
This is what I mean: I would like to adjust margins on the fly as I can do with Firefox.
Re:Instant Pages? (Score:2, Informative)
I added a simple check to my scripts long ago that detected Firefox prefetching and thew a HTTP 403 Forbidden status with a "Prefetching not permitted" message. It was straightforward to detect and block.
Hopefully Chrome either makes it easy to detect and block, or at least easy to detect.
Sites must opt-in by changing their HTML. Users can disable it for their browser by unchecking "Predict network actions to improve page load performance" in Settings.
Re:Instant Pages? (Score:5, Informative)
I did some Googling and apparently Chrome will send the following header when prefetching:
X-Purpose: instant
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/webmasters-faq.html#instant [google.com]
So it looks like it will be easy for me to block just as I have blocked Firefox prefetches.
Re:I can see a couple issues (Score:4, Informative)
If information about my browsing habits starts to become unusable then perhaps they will stop tracking it.
I'm about as pro-privacy as they come on this issue, but even I don't mind a web site doing analytics within its own domain to see which types of content are most popular so they can be prioritised, optimise navigation based on users actual needs, etc. It's the cross-site/cross-visit tracking that is creepy, IMHO, particularly if associated with any other data previously known only to some of those sites.