Chrome 18 Final Released

Google released the final version of chrome 18, this new stable release of Google chrome brings two new big features related to graphics and includes a handful of bugfixes.
Regarding two new big features : Now HTML5 Canvas content on chrome will be hardware accelerated and now it is possible to run WebGL content on Google Chrome without hardware acceleration.

The latest Stable channel release of Chrome brings improvements to both Canvas2D’s speed and WebGL’s reach. so that canvas-based games and animations run faster and feel smoother. You can go to chrome://gpu to see which features are being accelerated

“We’ve enabled GPU-accelerated Canvas2D on capable Windows and Mac computers, which should make web applications like games perform even better than a pure software implementation”,Google explained.

According to Google, the GPU acceleration will improve the overall performance of graphics-intensive web applications, making canvas-based animations and games “run faster and feel smoother”.
For older systems that can’t make use of of the GPU, Chrome can now display 3D content using the SwiftShader software rasteriser, which Google licensed from TransGaming, Inc. Although SwiftShader won’t perform as well as a real GPU, it will be an improvement for many of our users on older operating systems such as Windows XP.
On other hand the new version fixes a total of nine security holes, of which three are rated as “High severity” by Google.Security issues  fixed in version 18.0.1025.142 are :

• Medium CVE-2011-3058: Bad interaction possibly leading to XSS in EUC-JP.
• Medium CVE-2011-3059: Out-of-bounds read in SVG text handling.
• Medium CVE-2011-3060: Out-of-bounds read in text fragment handling.
• Medium CVE-2011-3061: SPDY proxy certificate checking error.
• High CVE-2011-3062: Off-by-one in OpenType Sanitizer.
• Low CVE-2011-3063: Validate navigation requests from the renderer more carefully.
• High CVE-2011-3064: Use-after-free in SVG clipping.
• High CVE-2011-3065: Memory corruption in Skia.
• Medium CVE-2011-3057: Invalid read in v8.

Google paid $4,000 in bounties to six researchers for reporting the same number of bugs, and handed another $8,000 to four investigators who uncovered flaws that were patched by Google engineers before Chrome 18 made it to its final milestone. The three remaining vulnerabilities in the nine were uncovered by Google’s own security team.
If you’re already running Chrome, you should see an update available in the About menu. Otherwise, you can download it from below link.
Download: Google Chrome 18.0.1025.142