Google Chrome 34 Gets Responsive

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Google is out with its latest Chrome web browser, providing users with improved security and new features for developers.

Among the big new capabilities that have landed in Chrome 34 is support for responsive images.

“Serving the same image resources to all devices can lead to slower page load times, wasted bandwidth and improperly formatted content,” Google software engineer, Raymond Toy wrote in a blog post.

The responsive images capability will help to solve that problem by way of the new ‘srcset’ HTML tag. Toy explained that srcset will enable developers to provide multiple resources in varying resolutions for a single image. With srcset, a web browser can pick the image resource that is appropriate for a specific device. The srcset element can be embeded within either an HTML picture element or a traditional image source (img src) HTML tag.

According to ResponsiveImages.org, the new srcset element is also currently implemented in Apple’s Safari web browser. Mozilla is currently working on implementing the capability as well.

There is also an interesting update to how Chrome enables users to automatically complete password fields on websites. Google Chrome 34 now ignores the autocomplete=off option in website code for password fields.

“This allows the password manager to give more power to users to manage their credentials on websites,” Google developer Joel Weinberger wrote in a Chrome developer list posting. “It is the security team’s view that this is very important for user security by allowing users to have unique and more complex passwords for websites.”

Security is always a key attribute of any Google Chrome release and Chrome 34 is no exception with 31 security fixes included as part of the update. Google has specifically identified 12 of the security fixes on which it has paid out security rewards to researchers. In total Google is paying out $29,500 in security awards for the Chrome 34 security fixes.

The top cash award is a $5,000 that Google is paying out for a pair of separate flaws that both target Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. One of the $5,000 flaws is a Universal Cross Site Scripting flaw while the other is an Out-of-Bound memory access issue.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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