Dec 05, 2016 07:00 AM EST By Erwin Castro, UniversityHerald Reporter

Google is finally addressing the 12 severity security flaws in its Google Chrome web browser. The search giant this week, has released the latest version of its Chrome browser, with Chrome 55 addressing multiple security issues and killing Flash contents in favor of HTML5.

The latest Chrome 55 update, according to Neowin.net, addresses no less than 36 security fixes which mitigate a variety of issues including a same-origin bypass, buffer overflow vulnerabilities, and the universal cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (much commonly known as XSS).

Four of these serious bugs were tied to PDFium, the Chrome browser's default PDF viewer. Another five were linked to universal cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in the browser's Blink web engine, and two were related to Google Chrome's V8 Javascript engine.

As reported earlier by Neowin.net, 26 of the serious bugs fixes were contributed by independent security researchers who just received a total of more than $64,000 from Google as part of the search giant's bug bounty program for the Google Chrome web browser.

The Chrome 55 update also includes some improvements in usability, including some improvements to the browser's V8 JavaScript engine which, according to Google, would provide a 50 percent average reduction in memory consumption. Google said the changes will impact mobile devices with lower amounts of RAM.

Another big improvement is the addition of CSS automatic hyphenation. This helped improve the visual consistency of text blocks by allowing the Chrome 55 browser to hyphenate words when doing line-wrapping. However, it's only supported on MacOS and Android platforms, and still not available to Linux and Windows operating systems.

As mentioned earlier by MacRumors, the update also brings the most visible move away from the Flash by defaulting to HTML5 and blocking Adobe Flash contents. In Chrome 55, users are prompted to enable Flash when they visit websites that lack HTML5 capability. However, Google has made some exemption here to minimize disruption to the user's experience. These include Flash supported websites and the ten most popular sites on the web.

The shift to HTML5 is no longer new to everyone, Google has been phasing out Flash support since September, with Chrome 53 of the browser started blocking Flash-based contents.

In addition, Google Chrome 55 is also available for download for Mac users, with updates for Google Chrome OS and Google Chrome on Android coming shortly. An update for the iOS browser app is also being planned in the future.

Google Chrome users can find the full list of vulnerabilities and bug fixes at the official Google Chrome blog site.

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