Chrome Browser 56 Update Released: Brings Improved Online Shopping Security, Page Reload Time

Google announced the Chrome 56 update to the Chrome browser for Windows, Mac and Linux Wednesday. The update with the channel number 56.0.2924.76 brings two major changes — webpages will reload 28 percent faster while consuming less bandwidth and power and the browser will now clearly mark shopping sites that might endanger your credit card data or passwords using out-of-date security protocols.

Faster Reload Speeds

“We hope this faster reload will come in handy whenever you want to get the latest content on your favorite website or quickly recover from a flaky connection in the subway,” Takashi Toyoshima, a senior software engineer at Google, wrote in a blog post describing the update on Thursday.

The Google team had earlier posted a video differentiating slow and fast load speeds.

Generally, users reload page when it is suffering from a broken connection or if the content has become stale. While reloading a page, browsers validate the page by checking if the cached resources are still usable. When a large number of reload requests are received by a page, it causes latency and performance issues due to extensive validation of multiple resources.

The Chrome 56 update makes page reloads 28 percent faster, cutting down validation requests by 60 percent by making changes to the page reload behavior.

Google claims that the simplified page reload behavior validates only the main cache resource and maximizes the reuse of such resources, resulting in lower latency, power consumption and data usage.

The Chromium blog post further cites data from Facebook that now shows 28 percent faster page reloads and 60 percent less validation requests from Chrome.

Better security protocols for online shoppers

The update has also introduced a feature that will make online shopping more secure.

Once users update to Chrome 56, the browser will flag any website that collects passwords or credit card information using out-of-date HTTP protocols as ‘not secure’ in red in the address bar.

Many online shopping sites have converted to HTTPS from HTTP. This change adds an additional security to standard web protocols as HTTPS assures the integrity and privacy of data exchanged between websites and visitors’ browsers.

The update is part of Google’s effort to bring HTTPS to all domains, which was announced in May 2016.