Chrome Releases

Do any teams in Google write a human readable change log?

The only one I know of that comes close is the Chrome team, which gets by with a blogspot[1] that sometimes has nice lists of the changes (sometimes in list form, sometimes in a paragraph with loads o' commas), and sometimes says stuff like:

> A partial list of changes in this build is available in the SVN revision log http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/perf/dashboard/ui/changelog.html?url=/branches/1750_132/src&range=253861:254028&mode=html

And here with Go 1.2.1 we get this[2].

It's not a huge deal in this case, but if you release a version and link to it and want us to know why its significant, it would be nice to find out why in English instead of SVN-ese.

Compare this to the great, readable version that Firefox offers[3]

~~~

[1] http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/

[2] https://code.google.com/p/go/source/list?name=release-branch.go1.2&r=7ada9e760ce34e78aee5b476c9621556d0fa5d31

[3] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/27.0.1/releasenotes/

Since you asked:

Most Chrome and Firefox releases (in my experience) have been relatively minor, and focused on security and bugs. Lets take a look at the last 4 releases of Chrome:

http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/11/stable-channel-update_18.html
http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/10/stable-channel-update.html
http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/09/stable-channel-update-for-chrome-os.html
http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/08/stable-channel-update_26.html

What argument could be made that longer release cycles would mean less bugs? Is there going to be better QA? More stringent testing? Why would shorter release cycles mean less testing?

No, longer release cycles would mean similar number of bugs, and security holes would just sit out there longer. Chrome and Firefox is an example of doing it right.

Not totally related, but someone know if exist an RSS feed to follow the stable Firefox releases? Can't find it on this page.

This Firefox changelogs are awesome to know big improvements and new features on a surface level.

For Chrome I didn't find a proper way to follow the releases even if it has some RSS feeds, I follow the RSS feed of Chrome Releases blog [1] with a tag filter [2] but can't exclude the several point releases, and also the changelogs are not very informative [3]. And the Chrome blog [4] I get some feature announcements but is a mix bag.

[1] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com

[2] http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Stable%20updates

[3] https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2021/01/stable-channel-update-for-desktop_19.html

[4] https://blog.google/products/chrome/

Looks like current ad specs allow third party javascript and iframes - http://storage.pardot.com/52662/23178/Spotify_Ad_Specs.pdf - linked from https://spotifyforbrands.com/us/formats/

Didn't the desktop apps use to bundle an embedded flash player before? I can't remember but it wouldn't have surprised me if they did.

Wonder what kind of html5/js engine they use for ads these days. (not that it matters, they are all swiss cheese security-wise, especially so if they aren't tracking upstream daily. If you think the sandbox is foolproof, well, just have a look at chromeos - time since last webpage-to-persistent-root exploit is currently about: 6 days https://googlechromereleases.blogspot.no/2016/09/stable-channel-updates-for-chrome-os.html?m=1 )

Seems to be disabled by default. I can enable the new behavior by going to chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash, but when I set that flag to "default" Flash works the same as before.

Has Google confirmed this actually made it into Chrome 55? Their blog post[1] about the release doesn't mention it. One of the article's sources is from earlier this year, and the developer thread they link to has been quiet for about a month. I wonder if plans changed and they're leaving it behind a flag for now, or if they're A/B testing it somehow.

[1] https://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2016/12/stable-channel-update-for-desktop.html

Here's Mozilla Firefox, search for "use-after-free", "memory safety hazard".

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/

Here's Google Chrome, search for "buffer overflow", "Use after free", "out-of-bounds":

http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/search/label/Stable%20updates

Edit: Chromium bug tracker talks to me now, query for "use-after-free" has 2157 results:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?can=1&q=type%3Dbug-security+use-after-free&colspec=ID+Pri+M+Stars+ReleaseBlock+Component+Status+Owner+Summary+OS+Modified&x=m&y=releaseblock&cells=ids