Google's browser, Chrome is currently leading in the world's browser user share with 67%, leaving rivals scratching for the surface, according to analytics vendor Net Applications.
The browser's dominance could be tied to Google's frequent updates, which happens every six to eight weeks, with the last upgrade on December 10, 2019. Google also publishes release notes aimed at highlighting upcoming features, additions, substitutions, enhancements and modifications to the browser.
And recently, Google patched a number of vulnerabilities with the latest Chrome release, with over $45,000 paid out in bug bounties to security researchers who are responsible for disclosing of the vulnerabilities. While Chrome updates happen in the background, users only have to relaunch the browser to complete the process.
What's coming in Future Chrome releases?
Chrome 80, which was released first week of February started the process of lock down on cookies, which Google announced earlier as a highly monumental change to the browser, by phasing out support for third-party cookies.
Google's enforcing of SameSite, will affect Web cookies distributed from third-party sources, not necessarily the site a user is surfing, but the user has to manually set and access over secure connections.
Albeit, Google emphasized SameSite's benefit as helping to prevent cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks, not for any privacy purpose.
Chrome 81: Support for AR & NFC features on the web
Google released a beta version of Chrome 81 last week, available for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. While the update include new APIs which will ultimately provide web developers with means to bring a host of new capabilities and features to the Web.
And foremost, Chrome 81 brings support for augmented reality (AR) directly on the web browser, which builds upon the functionality Google has been slowly adding to Chrome over the past few months. Additionally, there is a new Hit Test API that makes it easy to place objects in real-world environment.
Secondly, Chrome 81 introduces NFC framework for the Web that will enable apps to interact with NFC tags, which is essentially beneficial for providing information about museum exhibits, inventory management, and providing information in a conference badge, among others.
The current version, Chrome 80, already issue warning about obsolete TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.0 via a "Not Secure" alert in the address bar and pop-up with more information. Starting with Chrome 81, Google will add a full-page interstitial warning that interrupts attempt to reach the destination site.
Finally, Chrome 81 will by default no longer support FTP - File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is an old protocol used to transfer files over an unencrypted connection. However, users can choose to re-enable FTP support by enabling the FtpProtocol feature via the --enable-features=FtpProtocol flag or using the --enable-ftp command line flag.
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