Google has released Chrome 74 to the Stable desktop channel, which makes it available now for everyone to download.
This version fixes numerous security vulnerabilities and adds new features such as support for reduced motion preferences and feature policy updates.
Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop users can update to Chrome 74.0.3729.108 by going to
Settings ->
Help ->
About Google Chrome and the browser will automatically check for the new update and install it if and when available.
Google Chrome 74With Chrome 74 now being promoted to the Stable channel, Chrome 75 is now the Beta version and Chrome 76 is the Canary version.
A full list of all changes in this release is available in the Chrome 74 changelog and further details regarding development features can be found on the Google Chrome Developers platform.
Windows 10 Dark Mode support comingChrome 74 was supposed to include support for the browser's Dark Mode to synchronize with Windows 10's color settings. For many, including myself, this feature is currently not working.
As spotted by Techdows.com, this feature is being rolled out gradually to all Chrome 74 users. According to Craig, a Chrome community manager, only a small number of users have this feature currently enabled.
Support for reduced motion preferencesThere are some people who find it uncomfortable using web pages that have a lot of animation or motion. Chrome 74 includes support for reducing motion on web pages based on the preferences configured in the operating system.
This is done using the prefers-reduced-motion media query, which will read the setting from the operating system and allow web sites to honor it.
For example, this
demo utilizes animation as you scroll to show images of cats. If a user has the "Show animations in Windows" Windows 10 option turned off, the web site will honor this preference and not display the animations.
Show Animation Setting in WindowsNew Feature Policy UpdatesFeature policies allow web sites to specify what APIs should be available on a web site. For example, a site can specify that it does not want the "geolocation" api to be used on a site or its iframes by specifying a Feature-Policy: header or through attributes on an iframe.
Chrome 74 introduces a new set of APIs that allow you to query what features are enabled on the site.
High severity security issues fixedThe Chrome 74 update also includes 39
security fixes, with none of them being labeled as Critical, but five being labeled as High severity.
The rest of the security fixes added to Chrome 74 were found using internal audits through the use of tools such as AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, Control Flow Integrity, libFuzzer, or AFL.
Update 4/24/19 2:34 AM: Added info about Dark Mode feature being rolled out gradually.
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