Google patches 27 Chrome flaws

Google has paid out a record $16,500 in reward money to security researchers who uncovered 27 vulnerabilities in the firm's Chrome browser which were patched on Wednesday.

The stable build of the browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame is now at version 11.0.696.57, according to a posting on the Google Chrome Releases blog.

The patches fix 18 vulnerabilities rated as 'high' severity, six labelled as 'medium' and three as 'low'.

None of the flaws was given the highest severity rating of 'critical', but some could be used by phishers to spoof a user's URL bar, Google warned.

Other common high severity bugs in this release were 'stale pointers', which are programming flaws in the code that deals with dynamic memory allocation.

The patches follow hot on the heels of Chrome's previous security update in March, version 10.0.648.204, which fixed five high severity vulnerabilities and led to an $8,500 payout to researchers.

The release also features new speech input through HTML functionality which could be used with Google Translate to translate speech into other languages.

"If you're translating from English, just click on the microphone on the bottom right of the input box, speak your text, and choose the language you want to translate to," explained software engineer Josh Estelle.

"In fact, you can even click on the 'Listen' feature to hear the translated words spoken back to you!"