Google Chrome 28 is Out for Windows, Mac With Rich Notifications and Blink, Linux Coming Soon

Google today unveiled Chrome version 28 for Linux, Mac and Windows. The new version of chrome now comes with a notification center, however it is only accessible on Windows. The existing browser’s version can be updated directly by using chrome’s built-in silent updater or it can be downloaded through google.com/chrome.

This is the very first launch of Chrome that will be shipped with Blink feature instead of WebKit. The blink id can be checked by simply navigating to chrome://version/.

If you are marvelling about Google Chrome v28 for Linux OS,it literally arrived on June 17 before the Windows and Mac platforms. The minimal requirements for the new version had been updated to these Linux distribution: Fedora Linux 17+, OpenSuSE 12.2+, Ubuntu 12.04+ and Debian 7+.

“We’ve designed these notifications to be beautiful, useful and engaging,” Google says. Notifications through extensions and apps can be formatted to show images and texts, as well as actions will be included directly within the pop-up.

Since January, we heard the news related to the introduction of notification center on Windows and it was introduced in March which further solidified the expectation.

Basic web notification is already supported by both Chrome OS and Chrome browser, but rich notification Chrome extensions and applications truly modified the game as they can not only show different contents like images, lists etc, but users can also take out any action on them directly. Moreover, notifications now appears in a center outside the browser, which lets users to see the notifications even the web browser is not open.

Most probably, the next platform to get the rich notifications will be Mac. In May, it was displayed in Chrome for Mac and the Chrome official blog specifically said “Mac is coming soon”, however, Google has been saying this about Linux and Mac from last few months.

Most of the people believe that the notification center has been introduced with an objective to bring Google Now to the desktop, which was also displayed in pre-launch builds of both Chromium and Chrome, But Google has not still enable Google Now in Chrome yet, although, the company has been working with other extension and application developers to develop rich notification to integrate into their products.

Earlier, Google has also provided the following details for the developers:

Apart from the basic notification type shown above, you can use other formats like image to show a preview of an image within the notification or list to coalesce multiple notifications from your app into a single one. For example, a mail app could show multiple unread emails within a single notification using the list type. You can also specify different priorities for notifications that determine how long they stay on the screen before moving into the notification center where they continue to live until dismissed by the app or user.

As in the earlier launches, Google has also fixed some bugs in the latest release Chrome v28 and also in Chrome version 28.0.1500.7. Check out the SVN Revision log for more details.

At last, Google Chrome v28 also points out 16 security issues which are listed below:

• [252216] Low CVE-2013-2867: Block pop-unders in various scenarios.
• [252062] High CVE-2013-2879: Confusion setting up sign-in and sync. Credit to Andrey Labunets.
• [252034] Medium CVE-2013-2868: Incorrect sync of NPAPI extension component. [$21,500] A special reward for Andrey Labunets for his combination of CVE-2013-2879 and CVE-2013-2868 along with some (since fixed) server-side bugs.
• [245153] Medium CVE-2013-2869: Out-of-bounds read in JPEG2000 handling. Credit to Felix Groebert of Google Security Team.
• [$6267.4] [244746] [242762] Critical CVE-2013-2870: Use-after-free with network sockets. Credit to Collin Payne.
• [$3133.7] [244260] Medium CVE-2013-2853: Man-in-the-middle attack against HTTP in SSL. Credit to Antoine Delignat-Lavaud and Karthikeyan Bhargavan from Prosecco at INRIA Paris.
• [$2000] [243991] [243818] High CVE-2013-2871: Use-after-free in input handling. Credit to miaubiz.
• [Mac only] [242702] Low CVE-2013-2872: Possible lack of entropy in renderers. Credit to Eric Rescorla.
• [$1000] [241139] High CVE-2013-2873: Use-after-free in resource loading. Credit to miaubiz.
• [Windows + NVIDIA only] [$500] [237611] Medium CVE-2013-2874: Screen data leak with GL textures. Credit to “danguafer”.
• [$500] [233848] Medium CVE-2013-2875: Out-of-bounds-read in SVG. Credit to miaubiz.
• [229504] Medium CVE-2013-2876: Extensions permissions confusion with interstitials. Credit to Dev Akhawe.
• [229019] Low CVE-2013-2877: Out-of-bounds read in XML parsing. Credit to Aki Helin of OUSPG.
• [196636] None: Remove the “viewsource” attribute on iframes. Credit to Collin Jackson.
• [177197] Medium CVE-2013-2878: Out-of-bounds read in text handling. Credit to Atte Kettunen of OUSPG.
• [256985] High CVE-2013-2880: Various fixes from internal audits, fuzzing and other initiatives (Chrome 28).

These above bug fixes alone should trigger users to upgrade their existing Chrome version to the new one.