Google’s beefing up Chrome’s security by attacking the “patch gap”

Google’s beefing up browser security starting with Chrome 116

Google has announced that they are doubling down on Chrome security, promising faster updates following the release of Chrome 116. Starting now, Google will be launching weekly stable channel updates for Chrome, with new milestone releases coming every four weeks for the browser.

Chrome is currently the world’s most popular browser, and to beef up security Google are attacking the “patch gap”, the time between stable updates for their browser. By moving to a weekly update cadence, Google has stated that security fixes will now arrive on the browser 3.5 days sooner on average, reducing the potential attack window for n-day hackers. 

Back in 2020, Google began to release stable Chrome updates every two weeks, a change that reduced the company’s “patch gap” from 35 days to around 15 days. Moving to a weekly update cadence will reduce this gap further, tightening security for users. This change should also reduce the number of unscheduled updates that Google needs to release for Chrome, updates that are released outside of Google’s normal stable update schedule for known in-the-wild exploits.

Starting with Chrome 116, users of Google’s browser can expect to see more frequent updates and for their browser to be more secure than ever before. Moving forward, Google plans to stick to their 4-week release schedule for “milestone” updates for Chrome, so users of Chrome should not expect feature updates for Chrome to increase in frequency.  

You can join the discussion on Google’s plan to enhance Chrome’s security on the OC3D Forums.