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The latest version 23 of the Google Chrome browser has been released, incorporating a fix for missing audio when viewing Adobe Flash content while using a quadraphonic speaker setting.
The new stable channel release of the Chrome browser, number 23.0.1271.91, is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and ChromeFrame platforms, according to Karen Grunberg of the Google Chrome team in a Nov. 26 post on Google’s Chrome Releases blog.
Also fixed is a problem with an “Aw, Snap!” error message that causes a rendering crash under Windows 2003, according to the post. The high-severity security fixes include a corrupt rendering in the Apple OSX driver for Intel GPUs and a buffer underflow in libxml. The medium-severity security fixes include an out-of-bounds read in Skia and a bad cast in input element handling.
The new stable release comes about two months after the late-September release of the Google Chrome 22 browser, which introduced 3D gaming improvements and 24 security fixes. Chrome 22 included a Pointer Lock JavaScript API (also called Mouse Lock) that allows more accurate gaming while using a computer mouse. Chrome 22 also introduced Windows 8 enhancements and continuing improvements to the browser’s interoperability with Apple’s Retina screen technologies. The Retina screen support was first added in the previous version of Chrome, Version 21, in August and continues to be polished.
The bug fixes in Chrome 22 included one critical fix and 14 that corrected high-level threats.
Chrome celebrated its fourth birthday Sept. 4 and has accomplished a lot since its birth in September 2008. This past June, it surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the world’s most used browser for the first time and it has added lots of useful features and strengths over the years to encourage even more users to adopt it.
In June, when Chrome unseated Internet Explorer for Web supremacy for the first time, it was a watershed moment for the young browser. StatCounter data from more than 15 billion page views (4 billion from the United States and 850 million from the United Kingdom) for the full month of May shows Chrome took 32.43 percent of the worldwide market, compared with 32.12 percent for IE and 25.55 percent for Firefox.
In the latest October 2012 statistics from W3Counter.com, Chrome leads Internet Explorer in global share with 29.1 percent of the market, compared with IE’s 27.4 percent share. Mozilla Firefox trailed with 22.1 percent, followed by Apple Safari at 14.1 percent and Opera at 2.4 percent.
The Chrome 21 browser was released in August and featured 21 bug fixes as well as support for Apple’s high-resolution Retina displays for MacBooks and iPads. A key addition to Chrome 21 was the inclusion of a new getUserMedia API, which allows users to grant Web apps access to your camera and microphone without plug-ins. The getUserMedia API is the first step in WebRTC, a new real-time communications standard that aims to allow high-quality video and audio communication on the Web. Also included in Chrome 21 was deeper Google Cloud Print integration.