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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Tons of Updates in the New Chrome Release

December 11, 2017

Google has released a new version of Chrome. Chrome 63 has a lot of under-the-hood features with some speed improvements and better support for web standards. Bleeping Computer has a good summary list of the changes. There are also 37 security fixes from the prior version. One of the interesting new features is a new experimental feature called Strict Site Isolation. According to the Google engineers, the new feature is an additional security layer on top of the built-in sandbox technology. There is a definition of the Strict Site Isolation feature on Google's support page.

Google's site isolation feature improves security for Chrome browser users. When you enable site isolation, content for each open website in the Chrome browser is always rendered in a dedicated process, isolated from other sites. This creates an additional security boundary between websites.

Enabling the feature will increase memory usage by 10%-20%. There are two ways to enable Site Isolation now. The first is to use a Chrome Flag.

  1. Type chrome://flags and press Enter.
  2. Scroll down the page and find "Strict site isolation" and press the Enable button. Alternatively, copy and access the following URL to take you to the Site Isolation flag directly: chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process
  3. Restart the Chrome browser.

The second way is via a command line flag.

  1. Don't launch Chrome, but find your Google Chrome icon/shortcut and right-click on it.
  2. Select Properties.
  3. Select the Shortcut tab.
  4. In the Target field, add the following text "–site-per-process" at the end of the shortcut path and hit Save.

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