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Google has promoted today the Chrome 80 web browser to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Chrome 80 has been in development since mid-December 2019, but the final release Is now here and brings some interesting enhancements. The biggest change in Chrome 80 is probably the SameSite Cookie enforcement everyone is talking about.
Enabled by default, SameSite Cookie is a new cookie classification system that aims to make your browsing sessions more secure and limit non-secure cross-site tracking by treating cookies that don’t have the SameSite value declared as as SameSite=Lax cookies.
However, Google said that the rollout of the SameSite Cookie enforcement will begin later this month, which means that it won’t be available to all users at first. This is done to allow web developers to prepare their apps for the change, and you can find more details on that here.
Chrome 80 also adds support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in favicons in an attempt to reduce website resources, deprecates File Transfer Protocol (FTP) support, and introduces two new APIs, Content Indexing API for indexing offline-capable pages and Contact Picker.API for an on-demand picker for Chrome for Android.
A total of 56 security fixes are present as well in this new stable release, addressing flaws discovered by various security researchers in several components, including AppCache, CORS, Blink, JavaScript, Omnibox, PDFium, Skia, SQLite, WebRTC, WebAudio, and XML.
Chrome 80 (80.0.3987.87) is available for download right now from the official website. It should also pop-up soon in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. Alternatively, Linux users might want to download the open-source Chromium 80 web browser instead.
Last updated 4 years ago
