Chrome 80 browser comes with some very important performance and security enhancements. This means the web will be a lot faster, securer and less annoying while browsing with Chrome. Let’s discuss the major changes made in version 80 and then you can download and update the latest Chrome version on your device.
New features in Google Chrome 80
Same-site Cookies
Cookies are a way for websites to store website-related data in a small text file in the browser cache. From Chrome 80, some cookies will not be allowed to load and saved in the browser cache. Only those cookies will be loaded that have been created by the site itself. Third-party cookies were prone to privacy issues as they could be used to track the users’ activity in the browser and the advertisers used to serve personalized advertisements to the users. So they will be disabled from Chrome 80 and onwards. While this will solve users’ privacy issues, the advertisers will need to rethink their advertising strategies to serve a more personalized experience without using cookies for tracking. If you see the Chrome inspect console, you will see messages like these which means that Chrome is blocking third-party cookies for you and your privacy remains intact. Or These two features need to be enabled for a cookie to work on Chrome 80 and above: You can watch the following video for more explanation about SameSite or first-party cookies. More details here.
Getting rid of notification spam
If you browse the Internet a lot, you would have seen notification requests from websites to push notification to the browser whenever they want to. The latest Chrome beautifully hides these notifications under a single bell icon in the address bar. This means a lot less annoyance while keeping the notifications enabled. Read more about quieter UI with a less annoying notification system here.
More security with HTTPS enforcement
Chrome 79 introduced the ability to unblock mixed content on specific sites. Chrome 80 will automatically convert the audio and video resources on a web page to HTTPS. Other mixed content like links and images will still be loaded and displayed but the address-bar will show a mixed content warning. Chrome 81 will convert all content to load securely using HTTPS including images, links, audio, and video.
Blocking of resource-consuming ads
Chrome 80 comes with an option to automatically unload the advertisements which start using too many device resources. This option is available in all Operating Systems including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. This feature comes disabled by default. If you want to enable it, just open the following URL in Chrome and select Enable from the drop-down. chrome://flags/#enable-heavy-ad-intervention
Downloading and updating Google Chrome 80
There are several ways to download and install Chrome 80. If you already have Chrome 79 installed, then you can automatically update it to the latest version. We have discussed all the methods for downloading Chrome including offline installers here: Download the latest version of Google Chrome 80
