Chrome 70 adds fingerprint reader support on Android and Mac

[- !el Catire *O*]

 

The latest beta version of Google's browser, Chrome 70, adds support for fingerprint readers on Android and Mac devices. Thanks to this, developers will be able to use biometrics on their websites for two-factor authentication.

After the release of Chrome 69 on Google's tenth anniversary, the Mountain View company is already working on the beta version of Chrome 70 with some new APIs that developers can take advantage of.

One of them is the access to the fingerprint readers of the mobile devices with Android, as well as the Touch ID sensor of the MacBook Pro. This hardware is now enabled by default as part of the web authentication API, so that In the sites that implement the API, the Android sensor or the Touch ID can be used to carry out two-factor authentication.


 

Thanks to this, when the user enters their credentials to log on to a web page, the system may request that they confirm their identity using the fingerprint, as you can see in the image above these lines. At the moment it is not known if this option will also be available for Windows Hello or the Touch ID of iOS devices.

This is not the only novelty that we can find in the beta of Chrome 70. On the other hand, the new version of the browser removes the "Safe" label from the address bar, and now the label "Not sure" will appear highlighted in red . In addition, to improve privacy, Chrome 70 no longer includes the Android and iOS compilation number in the user identification string visible to websites.

On the other hand, the beta includes a new experimental API for detecting forms that can be used to identify faces, barcodes and texts in images through the web. It also highlights that the Bluetooth Web API, which allows pages to communicate securely with nearby Bluetooth devices, is also available for Windows 10. Until now it could only be used on Android, ChromeOS and macOS.