Google Chrome has established itself as themost popular browser across platforms, with Microsoft going to great lengths to dissuade its installation on Windows, which ships with the Edge browser. However, the desktop version of Google’s browser has been ahotbed of changes lately, mostly focused on making the user experience more personalizable. Now, Google is taking the next step forward with granular control over third-party cookies which you can disable temporarily using a new switch on Chrome Canary 117 for desktop.
Besides outright enabling and disabling certain features, Google Chrome allows you to switch them on and off temporarily, like the recently added switch whichdisables all active Chrome extensions temporarily. Reputable Chrome feature researcher and Android Police reader@Leopeva64 on Twitterrecently found a new in-development feature on Chrome Canary allowing you to temporarily disable third-party cookie blocking.
New third-party cookie blocking dialog in Chrome Canary
Some websites need a few essential cookies to work as intended, and enabling third-party cookies temporarily could fix issues that were breaking the website. Besides this, a switch that disables these browsing activity trackers only temporarily could greatly benefit people who forget to restart blocking after a while.
As demonstrated above, the new dialog explains how enabling cookies can help fix broken sites. Once switched on, the toggle mentions Chrome will start blocking cookies again after 90 days, which is quite a liberal limit. That way, you won’t be operating the switch frequently, even on web pages you visit often.
The current Chrome third-party cookie blocking dialog
We hope to see this new setting for cookies make its way to Chrome 117 in the stable channel soon. Cookies are infamously synonymous with unhealthy amounts of activity tracking, and mostly regarded as undesirable even though they are essential for some websites to function. Since they aren’t shedding that image anytime soon, it would be nice to see Chrome developers allow users to define how long cookies stay enabled temporarily, but perhaps we tread only one step at a time.
