Microsoft's Edge brower has had its "Copilot" AI tool integrated into it for a while now. In unsurprising news, Google has now announced that its will be bringing its own version of the same idea to those of us that use their Chrome web browser (which is most people). They're hoping this will transform how users interact with the web, shifting from passive browsing to active assistance.

Mirroring a situation familiar to anyone with a sweet tooth, Google has found the plan to decouple itself from cookies was fine in theory, but impossible in practice. In a big climbdown, Google's Chrome will continue accepting 3rd party cookies in a move that will no doubt please advertisers.

In an effort to improve the reliability of the results it returns, Google is experimenting with displaying a Twitter-like blue tick next to company websites has determined are genuine. A sound idea in theory, although it remains to be seen if the full implicattions of this have been considered.

Current web-overlords Google have been angling to do away with 3rd party website cookies for a while, and that plan is now moving into its final stages. This is likely to be good news for most people, as it should eventually remove the need for endless cookie banners. However, not everyone will be jumping for joy.

You may have noticed when searching Google for certain words and phrases that a lot of the results are not very high quailty. They have made some changes to their algorithm to try and prioritse "“content by people, for people” to try and minimise the effectiveness of pages with no real value other than to rank highly for specific keywords.

...a little bit. Most people probably have no idea what version their browser is running these days. They tend to look after themselves; automatically applying updates as necessary. Both Chrome and Firefox are approaching a big milestone that may cause problems for some websites.

We know many of you like to pile up the tabs in Google Chrome. While tabbed browsing is certainly a useful feature, it can start to get unwieldy once you have more than a handful of pages open at once. Google will soon be adding improvements to their Chrome browser to make things easier.

By default, when you first load Google's Chrome browser, it will display a single tab with a Google search box in it, along with some recently visited websites. However, it is possible to get it to always open a specific web page when you open it, and to also load any number of other pages into further tabs. This month's HowTo explains how to go about doing this.