Chrome 70 now available with the ability to control browser sign-in

Google has just released the Chrome 70 browser for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Although it comes with Progressive Web Apps on Windows, an AV1 decoder, and much more, the most important change is the ability to disable the new sign-in method that arrived with Chrome 69 and cause severe backslash due to the privacy concerns it generated.

The new option that turns off linking web-based sign-in with browser sign-in allows the user to sign into any Google website without being automatically signed into Chrome as well. To make it all as transparent as possible, an update to the user interface has been done to provide a fast way of checking the sync state at any time. At last, Google Chrome 70 will delete all auth cookies, while Chrome 69 keeps them to allow the user to remain signed in after clearing the other cookies.

Sadly, there is one problem that Google failed to address: automatic sign-in is enabled by default. Obviously, disabling it is not that hard, but it is always better to have such privacy-sensitive features disabled by default.

At last, there are also Progressive Web Apps on Windows instead of the Chrome apps that Google killed earlier this year, the new decoder, and so on. Chrome 70 is not ready for Android, but the iOS version is already available for download, in addition to the desktop variants that usually arrive all at once.