If you're one of the many families who share a computer in your home, or someone who uses their computer for both work and personal browsing, these stories may be familiar: You spent the previous day hand-picking your favorite browser colors and theme, only to discover that someone changed everything up. Or, you're trying to login to a retailer site to buy a saved pair of shoes, but autofill keeps suggesting the wrong password (your partner's, you guess?). It can be frustrating and messy, and that's why Chrome is revamping its profiles experience, making it even easier to create, customize or switch to your personal space within Chrome.

You can easily give everyone with whom you share a computer a space that’s just for them, including a color scheme and background (check out the new theme series by Black artists for inspiration), bookmarks organized just the way they want them, and their saved passwords. Also new in this update: for all those articles you want to read later, you can now add them to your reading list in Chrome on Android and desktop.

Once everyone's set up, it's easy to select the right profile for the right moment, switch to another profile as needed or instantly create a new one. Using different colors for different profiles makes it easy to distinguish them at a glance.

You can also access your Chrome profile on your other devices. Just turn on sync and get that theme you’ve selected, along with anything else you’ve saved such as your new reading list, your favorite bookmarks and your saved passwords across your devices.

We hope Chrome's new profiles experience brings you more structure and ease, and helps you better separate work from personal activities for each member of the household. Keep an eye out for these new features as they roll out on desktop over the coming weeks.

If you're one of the many families who share a computer in your home, or someone who uses their computer for both work and personal browsing, these stories may be familiar: You spent the previous day hand-picking your favorite browser colors and theme, only to discover that someone changed everything up. Or, you're trying to login to a retailer site to buy a saved pair of shoes, but autofill keeps suggesting the wrong password (your partner's, you guess?). It can be frustrating and messy, and that's why Chrome is revamping its profiles experience, making it even easier to create, customize or switch to your personal space within Chrome.

You can easily give everyone with whom you share a computer a space that’s just for them, including a color scheme and background (check out the new theme series by Black artists for inspiration), bookmarks organized just the way they want them, and their saved passwords. Also new in this update: for all those articles you want to read later, you can now add them to your reading list in Chrome on Android and desktop.

Once everyone's set up, it's easy to select the right profile for the right moment, switch to another profile as needed or instantly create a new one. Using different colors for different profiles makes it easy to distinguish them at a glance.

You can also access your Chrome profile on your other devices. Just turn on sync and get that theme you’ve selected, along with anything else you’ve saved such as your new reading list, your favorite bookmarks and your saved passwords across your devices.

We hope Chrome's new profiles experience brings you more structure and ease, and helps you better separate work from personal activities for each member of the household. Keep an eye out for these new features as they roll out on desktop over the coming weeks.

Keeping you safe and secure online is part of Chrome’s DNA. Along with providing strong default protections, we aim to give you accessible, intuitive, and useful controls so you can make choices that are right for you. So, today we’ve started rolling out new tools and a redesign of Chrome’s privacy and security settings on desktop, to help you control your safety on the web. 

Easy to understand controls

With this redesign, we’ve made the controls even easier to find and understand, with simplified language and visuals:

• It’s easier to manage cookies. You can choose if and how cookies are used by websites you visit, with options to block third-party cookies in regular or Incognito mode, and to block all cookies on some or all websites. 
• In Site Settings, we’ve reorganized the controls into two distinct sections to make it easier to find the most sensitive website permissions: access to your location, camera or microphone, and notifications. A new section also highlights the most recent permissions activity.
• At the top of Chrome settings, you’ll see “You and Google” (previously “People”), where you can find sync controls. These controls put you in charge of what data is shared with Google to store in your Google Account  and made available across all your devices.
• Because many people regularly delete their browsing history, we’ve moved that control, “Clear browsing data”, to the top of the Privacy & Security section. 

Safety check in Chrome 

With our new safety check in settings, you can quickly confirm the safety of your experience in Chrome.

• The new tool will tell you if the passwords you’ve asked Chrome to remember have been compromised, and if so, how to fix them. 
• It will flag if Safe Browsing, Google’s technology to warn before you visit a dangerous site or download a harmful app or extension, is turned off. 
• The safety check tool also has a new additional way to quickly see if your version of Chrome is up to date, i.e. if it’s updated with the latest security protections. 
• If malicious extensions are installed, it will tell you how and where to remove them.

Third-party cookie controls in Incognito mode 

In Incognito mode, where people come for a more private browsing experience, Chrome doesn’t save your browsing history, information entered in forms or browser cookies. While we continue to work on our long-term effort to make the web more private and secure with Privacy Sandbox, we want to strengthen the Incognito protections in the meantime. In addition to deleting cookies every time you close the browser window in Incognito, we will also start blocking third-party cookies by default within each Incognito session and include a prominent control on the New Tab Page. You can allow third-party cookies for specific sites by clicking the “eye” icon in the address bar. This feature will gradually roll out, starting on desktop operating systems and on Android.

A new home for your extensions

Starting today you’ll start to see a new puzzle icon for your extensions on your toolbar. It’s a neat way to tidy up your toolbar, and gives you more control over what data extensions can access on sites you visit. With this addition, you’ll still be able to pin your favorite extensions to the toolbar.

Upgraded security with Enhanced Safe Browsing protection and Secure DNS

We’re bringing you two major security upgrades that you can opt in to. First, Enhanced Safe Browsing gives you more proactive and tailored protections from phishing, malware and other web-based threats. If you turn on Enhanced Safe Browsing, Chrome proactively checks whether pages and downloads are dangerous by sending information about them to Google Safe Browsing.  If you’re signed in to Chrome, then Chrome and other Google apps you use (Gmail, Drive, etc.) will further protect you based on a holistic view of threats you encounter on the web and attacks against your Google Account. Over the next year, we’ll be adding even more protections to this mode including tailored warnings for phishing sites and file downloads, and cross-product alerts.

We’re also launching Secure DNS, a feature designed to improve your security and privacy while browsing the web. When you access a website, your browser first needs to determine which server is hosting it, using a step known as a "DNS (Domain Name System) lookup." Chrome's Secure DNS feature uses DNS-over-HTTPS to encrypt this step, thereby helping prevent attackers from observing what sites you visit or sending you to phishing websites. By default, Chrome will automatically upgrade you to DNS-over-HTTPS if your current service provider supports it. You can also configure a different secure DNS provider in the Advanced security section, or disable the feature altogether. 

These new updates and features, including our redesigned Privacy and Security settings, will be coming to Chrome on desktop platforms in upcoming weeks. We’ll continue to focus on features that protect your privacy and security as you’re browsing the web with Chrome, in addition to giving you clear and useful choices around managing your data.

Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

There are two types of people in the world: tab minimalists who have just a few tabs open at a time and tab collectors who have...significantly more. For minimalists and collectors alike, we’re bringing a new way to organize your tabs to Chrome: tab groups. This feature is available now in Chrome Beta. 

Now, with a simple right click, you can group your tabs together and label them with a custom name and color. Once the tabs are grouped together, you can move and reorder them on the tab strip.  

We’ve been testing out tab groups for several months now (as have some of you), and we’re finding new ways to stay organized. Through our own usage and early user research, we’ve found that some people like to group their Chrome tabs by topic. For instance, it helps if you're working on several projects, or looking through multiple shopping and review sites. 

Others have been grouping their tabs by how urgent they are-- “ASAP,” “this week” and “later.” Similarly, tab groups can help keep track of your progress on certain tasks: “haven’t started,” “in progress,” “need to follow up” and “completed.” My pro tip is that you can use an emoji as a group name such as ❤️ for inspiration or ? for articles to read. Tab groups are customizable so you can decide how to use them. And just like regular tabs, your groups are saved when you close and reopen Chrome.

Chrome’s stability and performance are important to us, so we’re releasing tab groups slowly in our upcoming version of Chrome, which begins rolling out next week. Tab groups will be available for Chrome on desktop across Chrome OS, Windows, Mac and Linux. If you want to preview tab groups today, it’s available in the latest version of Google Chrome Beta. (Note: if you don’t see tab groups in Chrome Beta, try restarting your browser.)

There are two types of people in the world: tab minimalists who have just a few tabs open at a time and tab collectors who have...significantly more. For minimalists and collectors alike, we’re bringing a new way to organize your tabs to Chrome: tab groups. This feature is available now in Chrome Beta. 

Now, with a simple right click, you can group your tabs together and label them with a custom name and color. Once the tabs are grouped together, you can move and reorder them on the tab strip.  

We’ve been testing out tab groups for several months now (as have some of you), and we’re finding new ways to stay organized. Through our own usage and early user research, we’ve found that some people like to group their Chrome tabs by topic. For instance, it helps if you're working on several projects, or looking through multiple shopping and review sites. 

Others have been grouping their tabs by how urgent they are-- “ASAP,” “this week” and “later.” Similarly, tab groups can help keep track of your progress on certain tasks: “haven’t started,” “in progress,” “need to follow up” and “completed.” My pro tip is that you can use an emoji as a group name such as ❤️ for inspiration or ? for articles to read. Tab groups are customizable so you can decide how to use them. And just like regular tabs, your groups are saved when you close and reopen Chrome.

Chrome’s stability and performance are important to us, so we’re releasing tab groups slowly in our upcoming version of Chrome, which begins rolling out next week. Tab groups will be available for Chrome on desktop across Chrome OS, Windows, Mac and Linux. If you want to preview tab groups today, it’s available in the latest version of Google Chrome Beta. (Note: if you don’t see tab groups in Chrome Beta, try restarting your browser.)

We’ve all been there: You have lots of tabs open and one of them starts playing a video, but you can’t figure out which one. Or you’re listening to music in your browser in the background and want to change the song without stopping your work to find the right tab. 

With Chrome’s latest update, it’s now easier to control audio and video in your browser. Just click the icon in the top right corner of Chrome on desktop, open the new media hub and manage what’s playing from there. 

Designed to minimize any disruptions to whatever you need to get done in your browser, the new media hub helps you to be more productive by bringing all your media notifications to one place and letting you manage each audio and video playback, without having to navigate any tabs. We first brought these media controls to Chromebooks in August, and today we rolled out the media hub in Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux.