mood Posted January 19, 2021 Share Posted January 19, 2021 Google Chrome 88 released: RIP Flash Player and FTP support Google has released Chrome 88 today, January 19th, 2021, to the Stable desktop channel, and it includes security improvements and the long-awaited removal of Adobe Flash Player. Chrome 88 is now promoted to the Stable channel, Chrome 89 is the new Beta version, and Chrome 90 will be the Canary version. Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop users can upgrade to Chrome 88 by going to Settings -> Help -> About Google Chrome. The browser will then automatically check for the new update and install it when available. Flash Player removed from Chrome To coordinate with Adobe Flash Player reaching the end of life on January 12th, 2021, Google has completely removed Flash from the browser. With this change, it will no longer be possible for organizations to use Enterprise policy to enable Flash Player again in Google Chrome. Google has been warning users since 2017 of Adobe Flash Player's removal and has been advising the enterprise to migrate away from using Flash in their environment. With this change, the largest platform used to run Flash content has officially closed its doors to Flash Player. FTP support removed Google has removed FTP support (ftp://) from Chrome due to its low use and lack of support for encrypted (FTPS) or proxy connections. Since 2014, Google has wanted to remove support for the FTP protocol in Chrome as it was determined to only be used by ".1-.2%" of the browser's users. With the release of Chrome 80, Google began deprecating FTP support with the addition of a new "chrome://flags/#enable-ftp" flag that controls whether FTP support is enabled or not. The initial goal was to disable FTP support by default in Chrome 81, but on April 9th, Google enabled it again to make sure there was no problem accessing content on FTP sites during the pandemic. "In light of the current crisis, we are going to "undeprecate" FTP on the Chrome stable channel. I.e. FTP will start working again," Google software engineer Asanka Herath posted to a Chromium bug topic. With the release of Chrome 88, all FTP support has been removed from the browser. Improved dark mode controls While Google Chrome has supported an operating system's dark mode settings for some time, it has not entirely synched all of its controls to use a dark mode theme. These controls include scroll bars and form controls. With Chrome 88, the browser will now display scroll bars and form controls using a dark mode theme. Dark Mode scrollbar Improved security against tab-napping attacks With the release of Chrome 88, when a user clicks on a link that opens in a new tab, the browser will automatically apply the 'noopener' context to the link to prevent 'tab-napping' attacks. Tab-napping is a security issue that allows a newly opened page to utilize javascript to redirect the original referring page to a different URL. This redirected URL can be anything the threat actor wants, including phishing pages or pages that automatically download malicious files. Web developers can add a rel="noopener" attribute to HTML links to prevent a new tab from using JavaScript to redirect the referring page. With today's release, Google Chrome will automatically apply the rel="nooopener" attribute to all links that open in a new tab. New Tab search experiment Chrome 88 brings a highly awaited feature that allows you to search through all of your open tabs. When enabled, you will see a small down arrow in a circle, that when clicked, will open a search dialog, as shown below. Chrome 88 Tab Search feature This feature is being tested as an experiment in Chrome 88 and can be enabled in chrome://flags under the chrome://flags/#enable-tab-search flag. Tab Search Chrome flag Developer changes in Chrome 88 This release brings numerous new APIs, trials, and changes to Google Chrome. Below we have listed the main developer changes: Digital Goods API for in-app purchases from web applications. AbortSignal in addEventListener() CSS aspect-ratio Property CSS Selectors 4: Complex :not() Don't Clear adoptedStyleSheets on Adoption to/from ElementInternals.shadowRoot Attribute Make Type Optional in WakeLock.request() Origin Isolation path() Support in clip-path CSS Property Permissions-Policy Header RTCRtpTransceiver.stop() Shared Array Buffers, Atomics, and Futex APIs in JavaScript New Origin Trials For more details, be sure to check out the Chrome 88 developer changes blog post. Chrome security fixes Chrome 88's security fixes have not been published yet. We will update this section when they become available. Source: Google Chrome 88 released: RIP Flash Player and FTP support Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mood Posted January 20, 2021 Author Share Posted January 20, 2021 Google Chrome 88 is a security update and the first Chrome version without Flash Google released Chrome 88 for all supported operating systems, the desktop platforms Windows, Linux and Mac, for Android and Chrome OS, on January 19, 2021. The release is a security update that patches a total of 36 different security vulnerabilities, one of which rated as critical. It is also the first stable version of the Chrome web browser that drops Adobe Flash support. The update is distributed to all systems automatically. Desktop users may run a manual check for updates to update Chrome directly; Google rolls out updates over time to the entire population and that may lead to delays before the new version becomes available. Either load chrome://settings/help in the Chrome address bar or select Menu > Help > About Google Chrome to run a manual check. The current version is displayed on the page that opens, and Chrome will download the new version to install it. A restart of the browser is required to complete the update. The Chrome Releases blog lists some of the security fixes of Chrome 88 (only those reported by third-parties). CVE-2021-21117 received a rating of critical, the highest severity rating, several ratings of high, the second highest rating. Adobe Flash is gone The biggest change in Chrome 88 is that Google removed Adobe Flash from the browser. Chrome shipped with its own Flash component and that component is now gone so that Flash content cannot be loaded in Chrome anymore. Flash will be removed from browsers and also operating systems such as Windows. Windows users get an end-of-life popup for instance if Flash is still installed on a system. FTP support is disabled, or is it? Google announced the plan to deprecate ftp support in 2015 but has postponed the execution several times in the past. FTP support is removed by Google because Chrome does not support "encrypted connections" or proxies in its FTP implementation. Google notes that usage is low and that third-party FTP programs are a better option for users going forward. The company planned to drop FTP support for 50% of users in Chrome 87, then for all users in Chrome 88, and remove FTP code from Chrome 89. An experimental flag, Enable support for FTP URLs, is available in Chrome 87 and 88 to restore the functionality. A quick test without the flag enabled revealed that FTP access was still available after upgrading to Chrome 88. It looks as if Google postponed the removal once again. The page on the Chrome Platform Status website has not been updated at the time of writing to reflect that. Mixed Content protection is complete Google revealed in 2019 that the company's Chrome web browser will upgrade or block mixed content, files that are loaded insecurely on HTTPS pages. Content was divided into types and Chrome started to display warnings and to block certain types in previous releases already. Chrome 88 blocks insecure image, audio, video, and text files from being loaded if they are served over an insecure connection on HTTPs sites and cannot be upgraded. Other changes in Chrome 88 Here is a list of other changes of Chrome 88: Dropped support for OS X 10.10. Chrome requires OS X 10.11 or newer on Mac OS devices going forward. Google is testing less-intrusive permission prompts. You need to enable chrome://flags/#permission-chip to unlock the feature. Permission requests are displayed in the browser's address bar after making the change. Chrome desktop users may enable Tab Search by setting the flag chrome://flags/#enable-tab-search to enabled. Chrome 88 supports the controversial Manifest v3 for extensions. Source: Google Chrome 88 is a security update and the first Chrome version without Flash Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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