Google announced in January 2010 that it would offer cash bounties for bugs found in the code of Chromium (which is the open-source browser behind Chrome) by following the lead of Mozilla. Mozilla was offering $500 as a cash reward but Google took a step forward and for bugs which are “particularly severe or particularly clever” offered $1,337 (yes, 1337). They rewarded the first of those this week.
On Wednesday Google made 4 cash prizes as it was noted in the Chrome release blog.
- Two $500 prizes for memory errors.
- One $1,000 prize for a cross-origin bypass.
- And the first-ever $1,337 prize
This prize goes to a man named Sergay Glazunov, the bug he found was “High Integer overflows in the WebKit JavaScript objects” says, Google.
This looks like a great idea the “crowd-sourced bug hunting”, especially for a rapidly developing browser like Chrome. It has only been a year and a half for Chrome introduced itself in the market and already they are testing version 5.0.
This crowd-sourced bug hunting seems like a great idea, especially for a browser moving through development as quickly as Chrome. Chrome has only existed for a year and a half and already they’re testing version 5.0.
Chrome is likely to launch its steady builds of both the Mac and Linux version of browser in coming next few months.