Google Chrome 19 stable ships with tab syncing, bug fixes

Jos

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Keeping with its fast-paced development cycle, Google has released the latest stable build of Chrome — version 19 for those still counting. The release fixes as many as 21 vulnerabilities, including eight high-risk bugs and another eight considered medium risk. In all, Google paid security researchers around $16,500 in rewards as part of its bounty program, with one bug related to an out-of-bounds write in libxml fetching $1,500 alone.

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Besides the bug fixes and other performance improvements, the highlight of today’s release is the addition of tab syncing to Chrome. This means Chrome browser users will be able to sync their open tabs across multiple computers as well as an Android 4.0 phone with the Chrome beta app installed. Chrome will even sync the browsing history within each tab, so going back and forward should work as well.

Although the stable version of Chrome 19 is already being pushed automatically to users, Google cautioned that the new tab-syncing feature will roll out "more gradually in the coming weeks”. After it becomes active you should see a new option for "other devices" along the bottom of your browser window, which pulls up all the tabs you have across different browser windows on any other device that you're signed in to.

The new feature complements Chrome’s synchronizing abilities which already includes saving bookmarks, apps, history, themes, extensions and other settings between machines.

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I believe he means Chrome lacks a bookmark sidebar. This has been a top Chrome request for as long as I can remember, for some reason Google remains uninterested.
 
Chrome used to offer Side Tabs, they removed the feature as of Chrome 16 if I remember right. Firefox offers the ability to customize the UI, Chrome doesn't:

Tree Style Tab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
Vertical Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs/
Side Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/side-tabs/

See my Firefox is using the Side Tabs extension but I edited it and made it to my liking: http://imagecrate.de/u/1337125316_firefoxsidetabs.png
 
I really like the tab grouping ability in Opera... wish Chrome had that.

I haven't really tried Firefox since like version 6, I always had stability issues with it for some reason. Maybe I should try it again...
 
Chrome is unusable for me without TabMixPlus and multi-row tabs that highlight not yet visited tabs with color and font.
 
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