Google gets serious about making its Chrome browser more secure

Google Chrome will get security fixes piped through more regularly in a move to help shore up the defenses of the browser.

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Up until now, Google delivered security updates to Chrome every fortnight, but the cadence of that patching has now been upped to every week.

Those weekly security fixes take effect from version 116 of Google Chrome which has just been released, as Bleeping Computer spotted.

Obviously with patches coming out on a weekly basis, Google can react quickly to fix the likes of zero-day vulnerabilities and other flaws that could be seriously bad news for Chrome users.

As Google notes, Chromium is open source, which has obvious benefits, but also some drawbacks in that malware authors also get to see under the hood at what fixes are inbound, potentially giving them ideas for exploits.

Google observes that this is why it's "really important to ship security fixes as soon as possible" in order to minimize any window for hackers to take advantage of Chrome users.

Google explains:

"Rather than having fixes sitting and waiting to be included in the next bi-weekly update, weekly updates will allow us to get important security bug fixes to you sooner, and better protect you and your most sensitive data."

Back in the day, before Chrome version 77 arrived in 2020, Google didn't even ship patches once per fortnight - the so-called 'patch gap' averaged just over a month (35 days) at that time. So, in comparison, the new scheme is a fivefold increase in the pace of patching.