News Bytes and Blogs _

Google’s director of Chrome engineering, Justin Schuh’s recent blog post stated that Google Chrome intends to kill off third-party cookies by 2020. This sounds a challenge for advertisers and marketers who rely on third-party cookie tracking to display relevant ads to users. The main reason for this update is the privacy issue that has been on and off a much-discussed matter.

Pinterest pushes Snapchat to become third-largest social app in the US
Pinterest had a big 2019 with numerous updates throughout the year to make the platform making it more user-friendly. Its new updates included shopping features where users can shop by brand, get personalized shopping recommendations, search in-stock product pins, click shopping ads and Pinterest Academy targeted at business marketing teams along with a promoted video ad format, and an updated lens feature.

Microsoft brings out the new Edge Chromium browser
Among browsers, Chrome tops the list at 65.40% of browser market share and the next closest contender is Apple’s Safari, with 14.22% of the market share. With Microsoft Edge sitting way below the race at 3.47%, Microsoft is revamping with its recent release of the Edge Chromium browser. The browser is immediately available for both Windows and macOS. It will be available for download as well. Microsoft has invested in robust built-in privacy controls and tracking prevention that has been a major headache on Chrome browsers.

Google updates Ads and organic search display for desktop
On January 13th, Google tweeted that it was rolling out its new ads and organic search display on desktop searches. With the new update, the ad call-out will be in black, making it a bit easier for searchers to quickly distinguish between an ad and the first search result as opposed to ad call-out being the same colour as the URL before. Also Google is making organic search results easier with Search results on desktop having a favicon next to the page title. Google explained that the favicon helps “anchor each result.” By this searchers will be able to quickly identify brands based on an image they’re used to seeing.