Chrome 70 rolls out with Google sign-in changes, PWA support, and AV1 decoder

Chrome is the most used web browser in the world and this week the company announced a big update for its product. This big update brings its version up to 70 and with that comes a number of changes for those who use it. Among many other things included in this big update, the highlight features focus on some changes to the Google sign-in process, support for Progressive Web Apps (PWA) on the Windows desktop, and the addition of an AV1 decoder (no encoding capabilities are included).

Chrome for Android has had support for PWAs for a while and the company has been boasting about the benefits major brands are seeing when they start using a PWA for their mobile presence. This has been limited to Android and iOS for now (without manually making changes) but that changes with the big update to version 70 of Google Chrome. Another big change we are seeing with his update is an AV1 decoder with MP4 being used as the supported container (ISO-BMFF). For those unaware, AV1 is a royalty-free codec from the Alliance for Open Media which improves compression by more than 30% over the VP9 codec. Many have been looking forward to HEVC (H.265) but AV1 has the advantage with it being a royalty-free codec.

Another big change with Chrome v70 is how the company has updated the Chrome sign-in feature. In the last version of Chrome, the company tried to make it easy for people by using your Google account to sign into Google websites using the same account as the one you signed into Chrome with. This meant that if you signed out of Chrome or a Google website then you were signed out of both. This was a tremendous hassle for me personally, but Google now has it included as a toggle in version 70. So if you liked the change then you can keep it but if you don’t then you can simply dive into the settings and turn the feature off.

The last major change with this new update to Google’ web browser deals with security fixes and improvements. Just as they had announced, the company is cracking down on extensions in an attempt to keep your web browsing experience more secure. This update will let the user restrict extension host access to a custom set of websites and even lets the user configure the browser so that extensions require a click to access to the current website.

These are the biggest changes to Chrome version 70 but here’s a video directly from the Google Chrome Developers YouTube channel that goes over the entire update.