Google Releases Chrome 12 As Bug Hunters Net £6,100

Google continues to reward bug hunters as the search engine giant released Chrome 12 to the stable channel. The new build boasts better security, privacy and graphics.

The bug-hunting build-up to the launch earned researchers a total of $9,970 (£6,085).

Google paid an unusual sum of $3,133 (£1,912) to Sergey Glazunov, a researcher who found a high-risk same origin bypass in the JavaScript V8 engine, which led to “a beautiful chain of lesser severity bugs which demonstrated critical impact,” said Chrome Security Team member Jerome Kersey. “It deserves a more detailed write-up at a later date.”

Reward Details

Google paid $2,000 (£1,220) to a researcher who found high-risk “use-after-free due to integer issues in float handling.” The search engine also paid $1,337 (£816) for a medium-risk extensions permission bypass flaw.

The company paid $1,000 (£610) a piece for a high-risk “use-after-free in image loader” flaw, a medium risk “extension injection into chrome:// pages” bug and a high-risk “same origin bypass in DOM” issue. The final $500 (£305) went for a medium-risk “browser memory corruption in history deletion” error.

Meanwhile, Chrome 12 is also more secure than previous versions in other ways. The company boosted its Safe Browsing technology to warn users before they download some types of malicious files.

New Features

Chrome also now gives users more control over data that websites store on their computers.

For example, Google worked with Adobe to integrate deletion of Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects cookies directly into Chrome. This capability was previously only manageable using an online settings application on Adobe’s website.

Chrome 12 also supports hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, something the company showed off at Google I/O last month. This essentially means prettier 3D effects, which users may see in this Chrome Experiment, Shaun the Sheeo. Users may rotate the video, toggle the reflection on and off, and activate a carousel of videos.

Other Chrome 12  perks include the ability to launch apps by name from the Omnibox, integrated Chrome Sync into settings pages, better screen reader support. Google also killed Google Gears in Chrome.

Chrome users will be automatically updated to this new version of Chrome soon, part of the the company’s nearly year-old, 6-week release schedule.