Chrome 80, released last week begins the process of lock down on Web cookies, which Google announced earlier as a highly monumental change to the browser, by phasing out support for third-party cookies.
The Internet giant also patched a number of vulnerabilities with the latest Chrome release, haven paid out over $45,000 in bug bounties to security researchers responsible for the disclosing of the vulnerabilities. While Chrome updates in the background, users only have to relaunch the browser to complete the upgrade.
And if the automatic update fails, you can manually update the browser by navigating to "About Google Chrome" menu under the vertical ellipsis from the upper right; which tab will display whether the browser is up to date or the download process presented before a "Relaunch" button.
Chrome 80 marks the first step in Google's lock down on Web cookies
SameSite prevent browsers from sending Web cookies along with cross-site requests, which serves as protection against cross-site request attacks and mitigate the risk of cross-origin data leakage.
While cookies are one of several ways of adding persistent tracking to web sites, which capabilities have evolved over the years, albeit with some legacy issues. The major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Edge) in a move to remedy this issue, are changing the browser behavior to privacy-preserving defaults.
Enforcement of the new classification system for web cookie in Chrome 80 will begin on February 17, which is the opening switch-on-SameSite salvo, with a small section of Chrome users, and gradually increased over time. Google will be rolling out new capabilities and changes in stages, allowing to verify if things are working as planned before extending to all users.
Other Changes & new Features in Chrome 80
Chrome 80 introduces an alarm bell icon with a strike-through at the right edge of the address bar, which feature is perhaps the first time Chrome will present quiet UI, an build-in browser dialog.
The so-called quieter notifications promised by Google awhile ago arrived with chrome 80. It's engaged manually by navigating to Settings > Advanced > Privacy and security > Site Settings > Notifications. And toggling the "Use quieter messaging (blocks notification prompts from interrupting you)" switch on the pop-up blocker.
Google has also promised to automatically silence some sites by enabling the quieter UI for some Chrome users, who have "repeatedly deny" the notification requests to auto-enroll.
Finally, Chrome 80 brings added enterprise-centric features as Google continued its move to enhance the browser's in-business capabilities, even more so as Microsoft is strongly pitching the Chromium-based Edge as preferred alternative to Enterprises.
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