Googlereleased Chrome 114at the end of May, complete with a new Reading Mode and a few new features for websites. Chrome 115 will start rolling out later today with the long-awaited replacement fortracking cookies, but not everyone is on board.
Google first attempt at replacing cookies with “Privacy Sandbox” wasback in August 2019, with a technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC for short. It wasn’t too different from the Topics API now rolling out in Chrome 114, except that the categories were far more specific, to the point where they could be easily used for “fingerprinting” specific users across sites. FLoC was extensively criticized bythe Electronic Frontier Foundation, DuckDuckGo recommendedblocking the feature, and most other browsers werenot interested in implementing it. Googlereworked its proposalinto the Topics API in January 2022, which has been in limited testing for the past few months. The same functionality is alsoin development for Android.
Even though the Topics API appears to be less terrible than the earlier FLoC proposal, it’s still ultimately a way to track your behavior online through your web browser and provide that data to any site or ad network that requests it. Back in January, Googlerejected callsfrom the World Wide Consortium (W3C) to redesign the API. Apple officially rejected it for use in the Safari web browser last year,saying in a GitHub thread, “We don’t think cross-site targeting of ads should be on by default as a web platform feature.” Mozilla is also not planning to implement the Topics API, witha representative saying, “our belief is that this is more likely to reduce the usefulness of the information for advertisers than it provides meaningful protection for privacy.” It’s unclear how which web browsers based on Chrome will keep the Topics API.
Chrome 115 has a few other new features, but they are locked behind afeature flagfor now. The experimental features include “HTTPS Upgrades” to automatically replace all HTTP navigations with HTTPS where possible, scroll-driven animations for web pages, and a Shared Storage API that reduces the need for cookies to store data across sites.
How to Update Google Chrome
Chrome will automatically install the update on your computer, phone, or tablet when it’s available. To immediatelycheck for and install any available updates, click the three-dot menu icon and click Help > About Google Chrome.
