Washington, DC - Google has just rolled out the stable release of Chrome 66 across all major platforms, and it’s fair to say that not everyone is going to like it. That’s because Google has dealt its first blow to websites that are currently protected by Symantec, and its subsidiary certificate authorities. Any Symantec, GeoTrust, RapidSSL and Thawte SSL certifcates that were issued before June 2016 are now distrusted by Chrome 66. Any certificates that have been issued between June 2016 and December 2017 will need to be reissued before October 23, 2018.
Google distrusting Symantec SSL certificates didn’t come out of nowhere; it was (and still is) a part of its long-term plan to distrust all Symantec SSL/TLS certificates issued off Symantec’s now-distrusted PKI. Any site that is getting penalized had a good six months to re-issue their certificates (for free) from DigiCert, which acquired Symantec’s CA business.
Administrators of distrusted websites must have received at least five reminders, and in all likelihood managed to ignore all of them. We know this because our parent company, as an SSL certificate provider, has sent hundreds of thousands of these notifications. Even after repeatedly reminding site admins about this impending distrust, thousands of websites are still going to get slapped with browsers warnings.
If you’re one of them, we suggest you re-issue your cert ASAP. If you don’t know how to do it, we suggest you here’s someone you can talk to.
New Features in Chrome 66
The distrust of Symantec certificates is likely to hog the limelight (as it should) as far as Chrome 66 is concerned. But there are two noteworthy introductions that we can’t afford to overlook. One of them is the automatic audio silencing of auto-play videos. I love this move as I no longer have to go searching through 30-35 open tabs (a rookie number for many of you out there) looking for the noisy culprit. Google had planned to introduce this feature in Chrome 64, and I was looking forward to it. But for whatever reason, it got delayed. But, as the great Greek philosopher Empedocles often said: better late than never.
Another substantial improvement that is being rolled out is Site Isolation. If you follow our blog, you’d know that Google introduced this feature in Chrome 63. However, it wasn’t enabled by default. Now, in Chrome 66, this feature has become a default setting. Right now, this has been rolled out on a trial basis and will only be available to a limited number of users. If everything goes smoothly, every user will be able to get their hands on it.
Site Isolation facilitates separate processes for separate sites. In other words, each open website’s content is treated as a different process. This results in better performance and enhanced security. The performance is improved as entire browser won’t freeze if one of the tabs crashes (phew!). As far as security is concerned, Site Isolation thwarts Code Infusion attacks as it doesn’t let one page to talk with the other. As a result, the hackers can’t infuse malicious code in Chrome’s Sandbox process. The only downfall of Site Isolation is that it may increase Chrome’s memory usage by 10-20 percent. Trust me; it’s worth it.
With Chrome 66, you’ll be able to export your saved passwords to other browsers. Apart from this, Chrome 66 also incorporates a whopping 62 security fixes. If you still haven’t received the Chrome 66 update, don’t worry, as it is being rolled out in phases. By the end of the week, it should be available everywhere.