Google Releases Chrome 79 With New Features Including an Option To Freeze Tabs and Back-Forward Caching

Google today released Chrome 79 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS users. This release comes with security and bug fixes, but also with new features such as built-in support for the Password Checkup tool, real-time blacklisting of malicious sites via the Safe Browsing API, general availability of Predictive Phishing protections, a ban on loading HTTPS "mixed content," support for tab freezing, a new UI for the Chrome Sync profile section, and support for a back-forward caching mechanism. ZDNet has outlined each new feature in-depth.

I don't trust any browsers anymore

[xack]

They're either Google engined or Google funded. We are in a worse situation than 2003 when IE had almost 100% market share and Safari and Firefox (aka Firebird/Phoenix) were only in beta.

Don't tell me about brave or pale moon, i tried.

Re:

[ctilsie242]

I am glad we are not in 2003, as we have more browser forks to choose from. Worst case, look at Palemoon, Chromium, Opera, Yandex Browser, or others. Of course, some may be owned by people with interests, but pick your poison.

Firefox-derived browsers?

[Futurepower(R)]

Does Chrome 79 install Windows system services? A much earlier version installed 3 services. I uninstalled Chrome.

What Firefox-derived browsers use the original Firefox Add-ons? Pale Moon and WaterFox are 2.

Pale Moon is often updated in what appears to be a very professional manner. An earlier version of Pale Moon would not allow the NoScript add-on.

Biggest problem with Firefox: Gobbles memory, CPU.

[Futurepower(R)]

Biggest problem with the original versions of Firefox: Firefox continues gobbling memory and CPU power when there are lots of Windows and tabs open, even if you aren't looking at any of the tabs.

Do the new versions of Firefox do that?

Re:

[SirAstral]

yea, I use Brave, it unfortunately is just not good enough. To many sites will not render correctly with it and it's security is still like a blackbox. Sure it likes to track and tout the number of times it has saved me from something but that it just as faceless as a piece of malware or telemetry collecting data on me that I am not aware of.

I do still use brave from time to time in hopes that it gets better, but pound for pound... Firefox and NoScript has been the best combo I have found in my opinion.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Blame Firefox. They started with that pocket bullshit and other "features" nobody ever gave a fuck about. A screenshot tool completely separate from operating system? Sure! How about a video chat client? How can we go wrong with that? A button to spam social media feeds with something you just found? Sign me the fuck up right now! Make a faster and better browser? *crickets*. Donate cash to political causes to appear "woke" and attractive to young people? Sure rubber stamp these checks all day long!

Re:

[thegreatbob]

Hey, it's not all bad... They've almost caught up to Chrome in version number.

Re:

[kingbilly]

Pocket is around the time I left them. I didn't like where it was heading.

It is crazy how different everyone's anecdotal evidence with FireFox has been when it comes to speed.
I had been using Linux as my desktop from 2004 through 2011. The last few years, I switched to Google Chrome because it ran faster for me than FireFox. But then everywhere else the same.
I've seen so many people on slashdot say that Chrome was a resource hog and ran slow, while FireFox is blazing fast.

I just haven't had that experi

Re: I don't trust any browsers anymore

[phantomfive]

Every single program that runs slows down your PC. They're all written that way. Thats what "shared resources" means.

Re:

[kingbilly]

Yeah it isn't lost on me that more programs have to contend for resources. But you are either trolling or think that my dad snuck onto my account to post.

I can play Destiny 2 on PC while streaming Hulu and thanks to my Ryzen 5 upgrade I don't feel a slowdown in either, and can continue to alt tab into Discord, Google Chrome, and Spotify with everything running fine.
FireFox with Gmail shouldn't bring my PC down to a halt, especially when none of the previously mentioned programs are running.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Synonymous Cowered]

LOL. Yeah, the glory days of the internet were the days of IE6.

Re:

[Waccoon]

They kind of were.

Back then, web pages were still documents. IE did a lousy job of rendering them, so you'd end up with extra spaces between margins or fonts would be the wrong size. However, the page, while ugly, was still functional. I recall I never had much trouble getting my designs to work in IE, even if I couldn't get the aesthetics quite right.

Today, web pages are "apps." I keep encountering pages that show up as completely blank, hyperlinks don't work, or otherwise the site is totally broken.

Re:

[Synonymous Cowered]

OK, well I guess we had different memories of that era. My memories involved:

-repeatedly helping people remove spyware that was installed through a banner ad (it can happen now, but nowhere near on the scale of back then)
-pages that were rarely dynamic so always reloading (because implementing DHTML was much more difficult to do reliably and more limited in capability)
-CSS that was difficult to use even across then-current browsers but actually wasn't even worth supporting because back then you still ne

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

What's wrong with Firefox? Or Chromium for that matter? Have you considered writing your own patches and building your own versions?

Re:

[twocows]

You can't stop me. Pale Moon works just fine for me on the vast, vast majority of sites ever since the update a few months ago that fixed loading issues I used to have on some edge cases. For the very small fraction of sites that don't work on Pale Moon, assuming there's nothing I care about, I just temporarily switch over to Firefox.

Here's [neocities.org] a guide by some guy who does privacy reviews on how to curtail some of Firefox's unsolicited connections, I partially use it (some of the things he recommends disabli

What's the Situation about Damaging Ad-Blocking?

[PastTense]

Chrome had plans to make changes which would substantially damage ad-blocking by add-ons such as Ublock Origin.

Have those changes been implemented yet?

Re:What's the Situation about Damaging Ad-Blocking

[bsolar]

Yes, but Manifest v3 is still in development and not yet in Chrome stable: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/11... [ghacks.net]

They plan a stable release next year though.

Re:

[grep -v '.*' *]

Supposedly Brave [reddit.com] will bypass that. Others [zdnet.com] will as well. Hopefully. Firefox [mozilla.org] isn't Chromium.

If uBlock Origin and friends go away then so will I. Lynx, here I come!

Re:

[swillden]

Chrome had plans to make changes which would substantially damage ad-blocking by add-ons such as Ublock Origin.

This is incorrect. The manifest v3 changes won't "substantially damage" adblocking extensions. When originally announced, the new API had a maximum rule limit that would have required adblockers to cull the deadwood from their rule lists, but after the hue and cry was raised, that rule limit was increased to well above the database size used by any adblocker.

Specifically, the new API would have limited ad-blockers to 30,000 rules. Many of them have as many as 70,000 rules in their databases, though the

Versions?

[DragonTurtle2019]

Versions, not quite sure what they mean anymore. I am pretty certain that this is not the 79th complete rewrite of Chrome. Am I wrong?

Chrome...nope

[bsdetector101]

Screw Chrome !