Google Chrome 13 Released with Instant Pages

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With Google’s rapid release cycle for Chrome, some releases tend to be bigger than others.

That’s the case with Chrome 13, which was officially released late Tuesday. The Chrome 13 release fixes at least 30 different security vulnerabilities and provides over 5,200 other fixes that improve the browser. In contrast, Google’s last update for Chrome 12 fixed only seven flaws when it was released at the end of June.

Of the 30 security fixes, 14 are rates as being High impact with the majority of the flaws being memory related issues, including use-after-free and stale pointer problems. As part of its security awards program Google is paying security researchers $16,000 in rewards for disclosing the flaws.

In addition to the memory flaws, Chrome 13 deals with a pair of Cross-origin flaws, including one that could have allowed script injection and another that allowed for a violation in base URI handling.

Moving down from the high-impact flaws, there is a medium impact flaw fix to ensure that extensions are always installed with a confirmation via a browser dialog. There is also a low impact fix for what Google describes as a “bypass of dangerous file prompt.”

While Google has become a rival of Mozilla in the browser space as both vendors race for market share, they help each other out when it comes to security. Google credits Mozilla researcher Olli Pettay for a low impact flaw to make sure the speech input bubble is always on-screen.

Google Chrome 13 is also the first stable release of the Chrome browser that includes the Instant Pages feature.

“This means that sometimes when you click a Google search result in Chrome, the page will appear to load much faster than before,” Timo Burkard, Software Engineer at Google wrote in a blog post. Google began experimenting with its Instant technologies in 2010 with Instant Search results.

With Chrome 13, Google has also finally provided users with a feature that other browsers take for granted – print preview.

“Many people have been asking for print preview in Chrome for a long time, and we wanted to do it right, using our fast built-in PDF viewer and an easy “print to PDF” option,” Burkard said. ” Thanks for your patience as we’ve plugged away on this feature.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.