Delays, delays, delays—Chrome update needed now.
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Just days after warning Windows users to stop using Chrome, Microsoft has withdrawn its bait and switch website promoting Edge as a safer, more secure alternative. But this story won’t stop there. Microsoft is pushing hard to pick Chrome’s lock on Windows users and security is a critical focus. But Google isn’t standing still, pushing its own AI security enhancements and safer browsing upgrades on its 3 billion users.
But Chrome’s issue isn’t security, it’s privacy. These are often seen as one and the same — they’re not. Chrome is fairly secure — its boss Parisa Tabriz is a security engineer after all, but its privacy scorecard is less healthy. Now there’s light at the end of the tunnel. A single click to kill tracking. But Google needs to decide how it will work.
Despite more Chrome security enhancements this week, with AI-fueled password changes as spotted by the ever reliable Leopeva64 on X, we have also seen stony silence ahead of the reintroduction of controversial digital fingerprinting next week and no clarity just more speculation on when tracking cookies will finally be vanquished.
“If you’ve been lucky enough to go hours, days or weeks without hearing the word ‘cookie’,” AdExchanger noted on this week’s podcast, “time to reset your clock to zero.” At issue is the timing of Google’s new global tracking prompt. This is one click to stop being tracked, something akin to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency that does the same and which dented Meta and others to such a huge extent when introduced.
As to when this will come, there’s no clarity — just a vague assurance it’s on the way. “So I think we’re in for the long haul on this one,” Ad Exchanger warns. “Google Chrome is still tangled up with the CMA and the privacy sandbox and all those new features are tangled up with the CMA. No sign of being untangled here. Let’s have a timeline now.”
Last month, DigiDay reported that “if anything, the latest details on how the Chrome browser will ask users if they want to be tracked by third-party cookies has only stirred up more questions than answers — par for the course at this point.” And those devilish little tracking cookies will likely be here until the global prompt turns up, we don’t want another years’ long wait.
What we do know is that before it goes live, there will be a protracted period of industry engagement and some form of settling-in period. It won’t be a snap release. There is also the no small matter of a CMA to appease, which will look hard at any Google conflicts in deleting tracking cookies and relying on its account reach instead.
“It’s not just a matter of getting consent,” AdExchanger explains. “It’s a matter of producing something that satisfies competition regulators and privacy regulators and the industry and consumers, and it’s not an easy thing. So as much as I do like to make fun of how long this is taking, I do concede that.”
Meanwhile, the Google versus Microsoft browser and search spat shows no signs of abating. Reports today suggest “a Google-backed coalition of browser developers” has turned to the CMA “to scrutinize Microsoft’s entire Windows operating system under its new digital regulatory regime.” The desktop OS monopoly taking on the search and browsing monopoly remains a popcorn-worthy case of Goliath versus Goliath.
But make no mistake, for Chrome’s billion-plus desktop users, the global prompt is a serious point. How it works will be critical — whether users click yes or no could be down to contextual presentation. “Beneath the frustration lies a deeper worry,” DigiDay says. “Google’s slow trickle of updates on cookie consent could be setting up a choice so opaque that users won’t have the information they need to make informed choices.”
But timing will be more critical. It’s needed now. But as AdExchanger wryly notes, “whether it goes live in our lifetime is another question entirely, and if I’ve learned anything over my years of covering the third party cookies saga, it’s that timelines have a tendency to shift.”