Google has debuted version 51.0.2704.79 of its Chrome browser, a maintenance release for the 51.x branch that fixes 15 security bugs and a few other bug fixes to get things back on track after the mammoth Chrome 51 release from last week.

Chrome 51.0.2704.79 is only a small release, and Google has introduced it to address some security issues that allowed attackers to mess with your browser's security features.

Google fixes two issues rated "high" that allowed bypassing cross-origin policies

While Google dealt with 15 security issues, the main stars of this release are two high-level bugs that allow attackers to bypass the browser's cross-origin code execution restrictions and run malicious code via the Blink engine and its Extensions component.

Both these issues brought in $7,500 for the researchers who discovered them, which is quite a nice bounty award, compared to the average payout.

Five other researchers also reported medium-level security bugs, with payouts ranging from $1,000 to $4,000.

These included an information leak and a use-after-free issue in the Extensions component, problems with parameter sanitization in the DevTools package, a use-after-free issue in the Autofill module, and an out-of-bounds memory read in the Skia module.

The rest of security bugs were reported in-house by Google's employees, and some were managed through the Chromium project.

No new features, only bugfixes to address browser crashing problems

Because this version is a maintenance release between the 51 and the 52 branches, there are no other game-changing features included in this new version.

Besides the security fixes mentioned above, Google Chrome 51.0.2704.79 comes with a few bug fixes as well, mainly to address some issues that crashed the browser or muddled up its download file paths. More details are available in the changelog.

Users can upgrade to Google Chrome 51.0.2704.79 via the browser's built-in update feature, or they can grab a fresh copy via Softpedia for Linux, Mac, and Windows.