Third-party cookie deprecation in Google Chrome

About this article

The purpose of this article is to provide a solution to the ongoing third-party cookie deprecation to prevent issues with the Templafy web add-ins in Chrome. 

Sections in this article:

• Background
• Implications for the Templafy web add-ins
• Who is already affected?
• How to Identify if you are affected and part of the 1%?
• How to enable third-party cookies in Google Chrome

Background

Chrome disables third-party cookies for 1% of users from January 4th, 2024, to facilitate testing, and then ramp up to 100% of users from Q3 2024.

This means that from the start of 2024, an increased portion of Chrome users will automatically have third-party cookies disabled even if they are not actively participating in the Chrome-facilitated testing phase. This testing period continues through to Q3 2024 when Google plans to disable third-party cookies for all Chrome users.

Implications for the Templafy web add-ins

Third-party cookies enable critical functionality across sign in and are also used by the Templafy web add-ins. As a result, disabling third-party cookies will break all Templafy web add-ins within Google Chrome when using Office online, showing the following error in the add-in task pane:

Who is already affected?

Google currently excludes most enterprise end users automatically from the 1% third-party cookie deprecation. The testing phase is supposed to only affect user managed and individually configured Chromes browsers.

How to Identify if you are affected and part of the 1%?

Browsers that are part of the 1% group will see new Tracking Protection user controls. The address bar for the Chrome browsers that restricts third-party cookies will show an "eye" icon on a site that attempts to access third-party cookies:

Additionally, Chrome browsers in the 1% group will get a new settings page chrome://settings/trackingProtection:

Everyone that is not affected will still see the old settings page chrome://settings/cookies:

How to enable third-party cookies in Google Chrome

Enabling third-party cookies in Chrome will resolve the issues with Templafy web add-ins. The resolution depends on if Chrome is enterprise or user managed.

Enterprise managed Chrome

Enterprise administrators can set the BlockThirdPartyCookies policy to false to opt out their managed browsers. 

In Windows this is done by setting a REG_DWORD registry key in the location

Software\Policies\Google\Chrome\BlockThirdPartyCookies

With one of the following values:

• 1 = Block 3rd party cookies
• 0 = Allow 3rd party cookies
• not set = Allow 3rd party cookies, but allow the user to change this setting

For more information, please refer to the steps provided by Google.

User managed Chrome

1. Open Chrome.
2. At the top right, click More Settings.
3. Click Privacy and security. Third-party cookies.
4. Select the option: Allow third-party cookies.