Chrome has postponed the release of the "SameSite" feature for cookies until a later date. The cause is the Covid-19 pandemic that makes the work of developers more complicated
Because of the coronavirus we can forget one of the most anticipated features of Chrome: the "SameSite" cookie classification system, already included in the beta for developers of Chrome 82, but now crossed off the list of new features coming to the official version.
SameSite cookies would have profoundly changed the way Chrome handles sites that try to track user behavior, making some of them non-functional (if not downright non-functional). In light of these possible difficulties, even for absolutely "legitimate" sites, Google has decided to postpone the introduction of this new feature to a quieter time. Website operators will therefore have more time to adjust their properties and be ready when Google decides to introduce this new mechanism for managing tracking files.
SameSite Cookies: What they are and how they work
The cookies are the files on which many of the actions made by the user while browsing on a website are recorded and can be managed both by the owner of the site itself and by third parties. Third-party cookies, for example, are those of ad networks that make sure that the user sees the same advertisements when he or she jumps from one site to another. The "SameSite" attribute is basically a cookie attribute and the site owner has to enable it for all his own cookies, but not for third-party ones.
If Chrome reads a SameSite cookie that points to another site (as in the case of third-party ones) it blocks it altogether. Basically, the SameSite attribute is used to force website owners to specify which cookies are their own and which are third-party cookies.
Google Chrome: skips version 82
The change just described, therefore, will not come with the next version of Chrome. Which, by the way, will not be the number 82: that version, in fact, has been deleted and will be skipped. It will go directly to the 83 (which will probably come out a little earlier than the schedule set so far). Once again the basis of the decision is the Covid-19 pandemic, which is slowing down the work of Google's programmers. The current version of Chrome for all 64-bit operating systems is 80.0.3987.163 and the current official beta is 81. What's unclear, though, is whether SameSite cookies will at least arrive with version 83 or we'll have to wait for more time.