Following last week’s release of Chrome 75, Google today issued the first public beta for the Chrome 76 web-browser. Based on a recent blog post from the search giant, hinting at the latest release of Chrome 76 Beta, the company has some big changes on the way not just for installable progressive web apps but also for dark theming and security.
In late 2016 and early 2017, Chrome blocked background Flash elements and defaulted to HTML5, with users having to manually enable the Adobe plug-in on a site-by-site basis.
In July of that year, Adobe announced that it would stop supporting Flash, and Google followed by announcing that it would remove the plug-in from its browser by late 2020.
The Chrome 76 beta by default blocks Flash in the browser. However, users still have the option [chrome://settings/content/flash] to switch back to the current “Ask first” option — where explicit permission is required for each site after every browser restart — for several more releases.
Another somewhat covert tweak: Google Chrome developer Paul Irish says “websites will no longer be able to detect when your Chrome browser is in Incognito Mode. That one’s going to be pain for publishers like The New York Times which use those detection schemes to keep you from reading an infinite number of free stories — and steer you into paying for a subscription.”
The feature freeze for Chrome 76, the point at which no further user-specific features are expected for a given “Stable” Channel release, hit way back on May 17 according to the official Chromium release schedule. The stable (non-beta) release of Chrome 76 is tentatively scheduled for July 30th. You can read about additional changes in Google’s Chromium blog post.