Google Adds Fingerprint Support To Chrome On Android And Mac In Latest Beta

Chrome has been one of greatest success of Google—and the company can only hope this continues to be the case for many years to come—In the newest version of the Chrome 70 beta, Google hopes to make logging into websites a little easier by allowing Chrome to use your Android or Mac device’s fingerprint reader as a form of two-factor authentication. Yes, it’s not quite a complete way to get rid of passwords, but it’s a start.

For those times you do need to enter a password or some other sensitive information, Chrome 70 will also automatically exit fullscreen mode whenever a page with a dialogue box pops up, which includes anytime a website asks you to enter an address, credit card info, or other authentication prompts.

The second change in the Chrome 70 beta is a trial run for Google’s Shape Detection API, which allows Chrome to detect and recognise things like faces, barcodes, and text within images. This should help improve features that rely on OCR (on screen character recognition) so that you could more easily turn a photo of a text document into a PDF, or simply make it easier to scan in a QR code without needing to pull out a second device.

Thirdly, while Google declared victory for HTTPS in Chrome 69 by removing the “Secure” tag from the URL bar when you visit a complaint site, if you visit a page still using HTTP, Chrome 70 will flash a warning in red so that you’ll know the offending site is “Not Secure.

Finally,  the features for the beta version includes an automatic full-screen exit when dialog boxes for authentication prompts, payments, or file pickers pop up for users to have a better context for decisions when filling the prompts out and intervention reports — to notify the user to honour an application request for security, performance or annoyance reasons.

The beta version of the web browser has been made available for Android, Chrome operating system (OS), Linux, macOS and Windows.