Today, January 19, 2021, Google released Chrome 88 to the Stable desktop channel, which contains security updates and the much awaited removal of Adobe Flash Player.

Chrome 89 is the newest Beta version, Chrome 88 has been moved to the Stable channel, and Chrome 90 will be the Canary version.

Users using desktop versions of Windows, Mac, and Linux can upgrade to Chrome 88 by selecting Settings -> Help -> About Google Chrome. When a new update becomes available, the browser will then check for it automatically and install it.

Removal of Flash Player from Chrome
On January 12th, 2021, Adobe Flash Player will no longer be supported, hence Google has totally removed Flash from the browser.

Organizations will no longer be able to use Enterprise policy to re-enable Flash Player in Google Chrome as a result of this change.

Since 2017, Google has been alerting consumers to the impending demise of Adobe Flash Player and recommending businesses to stop utilising it in their environments.

With this modification, Flash Player is no longer supported by the main platform for running Flash content.

FTP support was dropped
Due to its limited usage and lack of support for proxy or encrypted (FTPS) connections, Google decided to remove FTP support (ftp:/) from Chrome.

Because only “.1-.2%” of Chrome users actually utilise the FTP protocol, Google has been attempting to get rid of it since 2014.

With the introduction of a new “chrome:/flags/#enable-ftp” flag that determines whether or not FTP support is enabled, Google started deprecating FTP support with the release of Chrome 80.

In order to ensure that there would be no issues with accessing content on FTP sites during the epidemic, Google restored FTP support once more on April 9th, reversing the previous decision to disable it by default in Chrome 81.

“We will “undeprecate” FTP on the Chrome stable channel in light of the present problem. FTP, for instance, will resume operation “Asanka Herath, a Google software engineer, commented on a Chromium issue topic.

The browser no longer offers any FTP support as of the release of Chrome 88.

enhanced controls for the dark mode
Although Google Chrome has long supported operating system dark mode settings, not all of its controls have been converted to a dark mode style. Scroll bars and form controls are some of these controls.

With Chrome 88, the browser now uses a dark mode theme to display scroll bars and form controls.

increased protection against tabbing assaults
In order to prevent “tabnabbing” assaults, Chrome 88 will automatically apply the “noopener” context to links that open in new tabs when a user clicks on them. This attack technique is referred to as “tab-napping” by Google.

A security flaw called “tabbing” enables a freshly opened page to use javascript to send the user to a different URL from the one they were originally on. Any URL the threat actor chooses, such as phishing pages or pages that automatically download malicious files, might be used as the redirected URL.

HTML links can have a rel=”noopener” property added by web designers to stop a new tab from changing the referring page using JavaScript.

With the introduction of Google Chrome today, any links that open in a new tab will instantly have the rel=”nooopener” attribute applied to them.

New Tab search demonstration
The long-awaited capability of being able to search through all of your open tabs finally arrives in Chrome 88. When activated, a small down arrow will appear in a circle, and clicking it will launch a search dialogue.

PE firm Insight Partners invests $290M for a majority stake in CivicPlus, which provides software and other technology to more than 4,000 municipal governments (AJ Dome/Manhattan Mercury)

AJ Dome / Manhattan Mercury:
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