News

Important update on 3rd-party cookies and SeamlessAccess The summary: good news! As mentioned in our last blog post, Google’s recent announcement about their continued support for third-party cookies left us with some unanswered questions about what that exactly means for SeamlessAccess. In particular, what was not clear from the brief announcement text is what impact this change of direction will have on SeamlessAccess’ ability to remember the user’s choice of institute across participating websites, an important part of the usability improvements that SeamlessAccess offers.

3rd-Party Cookies and Storage Access API, Revisited, Once again Last week’s announcement from Google Last week, in an unexpected turn of events, Google announced that they have “made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies.” - in other words: Google will continue to support third-party cookies ‘as is’ for the foreseeable future, after all.

Update: SeamlessAccess release on 12 March Update: As communicated over Slack, the below release was rolled back because of unexpected compatibility issues for a small number of integrators. These issues have now been addressed and tested. We are releasing the new version of SeamlessAccess on Wed, 12 March. Please note that this is a backward compatible change, also supporting the current SeamlessAccess implementation. As always, we will be closely monitoring the service before, during and after the release.

Please test: SeamlessAccess with Storage Access API (and an update from Google) Migration to Storage Access API As discussed in a string of blog posts last year, SeamlessAccess will be migrating to a new technology. This migration is needed in order to adapt to changes in how browser engines operate, in particular the deprecation of third-party cookies. If you are not familiar with this topic, we encourage you to read through the posts linked just above.

Coming up: Storage Access API and IdP filtering, ready for testing As discussed in previous blog posts, see for example this post from 16 October, we are developing a version of SeamlessAccess that uses a new technology called Storage Access API. With this new technology, which is supported by different browsers, SeamlessAccess will continue to be able to remember and present the user’s choice of institute in the SeamlessAccess button. For the user this means that once they have located their home institute provider on one website, they can re-use that choice on the next website they visit and enjoy a much easier access experience.

A new chapter in the ‘browser changes’ journey: Preparing for the switch to Storage Access API Over the last couple of years, we have posted regularly about changes that are being made to the way that browsers work and how those changes will affect SeamlessAccess (see e.g. this post from Feb 2024 or this post from Nov 2023 and references therein). These changes primarily impact SeamlessAccess’ ability to remember the user’s choice of home institute across participating websites, a functionality that we refer to as “global persistence”.

Signed up for Google’s storage partitioning trial? Time to renew! As we talked about in a post back in February “Calling all SeamlessAccess integrators to participate in deprecation trial for unpartitioned third-party storage” - and before that as part of a longer explanation back in 2023 - the team that works on Google Chrome has made available a limited-time trial that allows participating sites to continue to use unpartitioned storage in the browser.

Google’s updated approach to third-party cookies: What does it mean for SeamlessAccess? In a blog post that came out in April, we spoke about changes to browser technology and what impact those are likely to have on access experiences and SeamlessAccess. At the time, following Google’s communication on the subject, we worked under the understanding that Google would roll out deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome to 100% by the end of this year.

Important update for all SeamlessAccess integrators regarding the impact of browser changes. Today’s post updates the evolving story about changes to browser engines and how those changes affect SeamlessAccess. Perhaps the most visible change in this context is the deprecation of third-party cookies by Google Chrome, which has already been rolled out to 1% of users and that will be ramped up “to reach 100% of Chrome clients by the end of Q4, subject to addressing any remaining concerns of the CMA.

Calling all SeamlessAccess integrators to participate in deprecation trial for unpartitioned third-party storage In a blog post published towards the end of last year, we spoke about an update to Google’s Chrome browser that by default enabled a new feature called Storage Partitioning. This feature effectively blocks third-party websites from accessing information held in the local browser storage, which is used by SeamlessAccess to show the user’s remembered choice of institute in its button.