After 23 years, Google fixed the bug in Google Chrome related to someone seeing your history
Google Chrome: 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 on any website when the same link was present.
Google Chrome contains a bug that other organizations or web pages can use to view your history on the web. Google recently announced the release of the update to this. Chrome is about to receive a patch, which will correct a highly outdated privacy bug. This bug had existed in the browser for around 23 years and by it, any website was able to identify the sites a user had visited in the past.
In the past, a few web browsers have implemented some workarounds to prevent this issue, but according to Google, the new solution that has come this time entirely resolves this security vulnerability. This solution will come in Google Chrome version 136, and it will reach all the users on the stable channel by the end of this month i.e. by April 23.
Google said on its Chrome developer blog earlier this month that they have fixed the problem in the visited selector of CSS, due to which websites could 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.
By 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.
To root out this problem, 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.
That is, now it will 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.
