Google Chrome 56 is rolling out to desktop users, with a number of small new features and security fixes in tow.
Those of you who dislike Flash will be pleased to hear that as of this release ‘HTML5 by Default‘ is enabled for all users. The feature is part of wider efforts to wean web users off of Adobe Flash, leading to abetter performance and safer web browsing.
As part of this effort you should expect to see Flash prompts on sites you don’t regularly visit. By October, all sites that serve Flash will require explicit user permission to run.
Elsewhere, Chrome 56 helps improve security awareness. You’ll begin to see a ‘not secure‘ label in the URL address bar when visiting websites that collect or transfer sensitive information over non-HTTPS connections.
Like Firefox 51, Chrome 56 also brings native support for FLAC to the table (within FLAC and Ogg containers), WebGL 2.0 support ships turned-on by default, and there’s improved web bluetooth support for BLE devices.
Download Google Chrome 56
You can (as always) download the very latest release of Google Chrome for Windows, macOS and Linux from the official Google website.
If you’re using Ubuntu, and have an earlier version of Google Chrome installed, you’ll receive this latest stable release update through Update Manager.