Chrome 40 beta arrives with revamped bookmarks manager, removes SSL 3.0 completely

Less than a day after releasing the stable version of Chrome 39, Google has announced Chrome 40 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Details are still scarce on everything included in this new release, but we do know it features a revamped bookmark manager and removes SSL 3.0 support completely.

Google says the revamped bookmarks manager is rolling out gradually “over the next few weeks.” You’ll be able to access it by going to your Chrome Menu, clicking on Bookmarks, and choosing Bookmarks Manager.

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For those who have tried the Google Stars extension for Chrome, they should experience a big déjà vu. The extension’s features are being baked right into Chrome 40 beta and will presumably arrive with a stable release of Chrome in the near future.

Google wants to highlight the following new features:

• Improved search: Quickly find that elusive page with search powered by Google, which looks not only at the bookmark title and snippet, but also the bookmarked page’s content.
• Collect bookmarks by topic: Your bookmarks will automatically be organized by topic, like “Tokyo” and “Photography.” If you’d rather, you can still organize them into folders yourself.
• Familiar bookmarks, new look: Your existing bookmarks will automatically get updated with images and descriptions, wherever possible.
• Share: Have a folder of favorite bookmarks? You can make it public and share the link with whomever you’d like to access it.
• Access your bookmarks anywhere: Bookmarked an article on your phone to finish reading on your laptop? Chrome will continue to sync your bookmarks across all of your devices, just like it does today.

As for the SSL protocol, Google already disabled the fallback to version 3.0 in Chrome 39. In Chrome 40, the company is removing SSL 3.0 completely.

The move is a response to a serious security vulnerability in the protocol the company revealed on October 14. So far everything is going according to plan with Chrome 39 and soon Chrome 40.

Google releases new versions of Chrome every six weeks or so. The stable release of Chrome 40 would thus normally be slated to arrive by the end of December, but given the holidays, we wouldn’t be surprised if it launched early next year.

Update on November 20: Google has shared a few more details about Chrome 40 beta. Here’s the changelog:

• Profile Lock, which introduces the ability to “child lock” signed-in profiles.
• New Tabs Page Suggestions, which tries to determine which sites you’d like to visit depending on the the time and day.
• New crash recovery UI.

The second point sounds particularly interesting; we’ll look into it and let you know when we find out more.

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