by Martin Brinkmann on September 26, 2018 in Google Chrome – 11 comments
Google revealed in a blog post on the company’s official blog that it plans to incorporate changes into Chrome 70 that address user concerns that arose after the release of Chrome 69.
Chrome 69 featured an interface design refresh, something that is very rare when it comes to Google Chrome. While that caused some users to voice their dislike, it was not the major concern that users had with Chrome 69. (Tip: you can revert the Chrome 69 design for now.)
The same was true for the decision to hide trivial parts of a domain in the Chrome address bar; Google did revert the decision in Chrome Stable after some backlash on the Internet.
The first major change that blew up in the company’s face was the linking of the Google Account in Chrome with Google services on the Web.
What that meant was that sign-ins and sign-outs were executed both in Chrome and on the Web. A user who signed in to Gmail on the Web was automatically signed in to Chrome. While that did not mean that Chrome would do anything with the data by default according to Google, no syncing for instance unless the user enabled that option in an extra step, it still made many users uncomfortable.
Google explained that it launched the changed to “better help users who share a single device” who are “confused about Chrome’s sign-in state”.
We think these UI changes help prevent users from inadvertently performing searches or navigating to websites that could be saved to a different user’s synced account.
Chrome 69 includes an experimental flag to disable the link between Chrome and Google Accounts on the web, and there are other things users can do to avoid confusion or the mixing up.
Then, a few days later, news broke that Chrome would not sign users out of the Google Account anymore when they used the Clear Browsing Data dialog of the browser to clear cookies.
Changes in Chrome 70
Google revealed today that it plans to incorporate changes in Chrome 70 to give users of the web browser more control over the experience.
- The company plans to add a new preference to the privacy and security settings of the browser to disable the link between the Chrome account and Google accounts on the Web.
- Visual changes to the Sync interface to make the current status clearer to users (signed out, signed out but not syncing, and syncing).
- The Google auth cookie will be cleared with all the other cookies when users clear cookies in the web browser.
Google Chrome 70 will be released in mid-October 2018 to the Stable channel. The changes are not yet live in development builds of the browser.