Google Chrome 80 brings new cookie policy, updated notifications and more

• Google has started rolling out Chrome 80 for desktop and Android users.
• The update brings a new cookie policy, quieter notifications and mixed content upgrade.

Google has started rolling out a new version of its Chrome browser for desktop and Android users. Google Chrome 80 brings several new features, security patches and bug fixes. The main highlights of the update include a new cookie policy, quieter notifications and mixed content upgrade.

SameSite cookies

The first big change that this update brings is the changing the way Chrome handles cookies. Cookies are nothing but simple text-based files that websites exchange with the browser.

Chrome earlier allowed all cookies to load without any restrictions about where the cookie was being loaded from. This allowed websites to track users as they move across the web using the cookies they load via ads and tracking scripts.

Google is now changing this to secure the users data by enforcing a new secure-by-default cookie classification. Google will now disallow setting the SameSite tag to ‘none’ and it will default to ‘lax’. This means that the user’s cookies will only be available to other sites from top-level navigations.

Quieter notifications

Another change that this update brings is quieter notifications. With this, Chrome will block notifications from websites by default instead of the user having to do it.

The quieter notification setting can be enabled once you get the Chrome 80 update.

• Go to Settings > Site Settings > Notifications.
  
• Now, enable the checkbox for ‘Use quieter messaging’.
  

Apart from this, Chrome will also block some notifications on its own. If a site has low acceptance rates for notifications or if you dismiss a notification on a site, they will be blocked automatically. Chrome will notify you when a notification is blocked. Desktop users will receive a notification on the right side of the omnibox and Android users will see a pop-up at the bottom of the browser.

Mixed content upgrade

As part of Google’s three-step plan to eliminate mixed HTTPs content, mixed audio and video resources will be auto upgraded from HTTP to HTTPS. If the resources fail to load over HTTPS, Chrome will block them by default. Users will still be allowed to unblock such resources.

In its next upgrade in Chrome 81, Google will auto upgrade mixed images to HTTPS and block them if they fail to load.

Other changes

Chrome 80 will also bring support for blocking heavy ads that use too many resources, such as CPU or RAM on desktop and Android devices. The update will also allow developers to use scalable SVG images as favicons and allow authors to link a specific portion of a webpage by adding a text fragment to the website URL.

Coming to the security patches, the Chrome 80 update brings a fix for 56 vulnerabilities identified in the browser.

See also:

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