Google Chrome: After 23 years Google fixed the bug, other people could see your history..

There is a bug in Google Chrome that other companies or sites can take advantage of to see your web history. Now Google has announced to release of an update for this. A patch is going to come in Chrome very soon, which will fix a very old privacy bug. This bug was present in the browser for about 23 years and due to this any website could find out which websites the user had visited before.

Over the years, some web browsers have adopted some measures to avoid this problem, but Google says that the new fix that has come this time completely resolves this security flaw. This fix will be included in version 136 of Google Chrome, which will be rolled out on the stable channel for all users by the end of this month i.e. around April 23. Advertisement

How visited link partitioning works
Google said on its Chrome developer blog earlier this month that it has fixed a problem in the visited selector of CSS, which allowed websites to steal information related to the user's browsing history.

When a user clicks on a link, the browser changes the color of that link to show that the link has been visited. Usually the color of the visited link changes from blue to purple, but this purple color was visible not only on that website but also when the same link was on any website.

Taking advantage of this weakness, scammers could find out the user's browsing history through the website code. This problem was first identified in May 2022, but it is about 23 years old.

Google's solution - a three-tier partitioning system
To eradicate this problem from the root, Google worked at three levels. Google's new system ensures that if a user has clicked on a link to site B on site A, that link will not appear as visited (purple) on-site C.

This means that it will now be impossible for a website to know whether the user has ever visited that link before or not. Apart from this, Google will also limit the ability to check the: visited link history present inside Chrome Frames.

Google says that this bug has been completely fixed in Chrome version 136. Currently, beta testers and users who are using nightly builds (daily updates) are already safe from this 23-year-old bug.

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