Chrome 126 Enterprise and Education Release Highlights

Third-Party Cookie Deprecation: Testing continues with third-party cookies disabled for 1% of users, preparing for broader deprecation.
PDF OCR Accessibility: A new Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature for PDFs enables screen readers to access text in inaccessible PDF documents, enhancing accessibility.
Memory Saver Mode: An aggressive Memory Saver mode deactivates unused tabs to free up memory, configurable by administrators.
Out-of-Process PDF Viewer: A new PDF viewer architecture, enabled as an out-of-process iframe, improves stability and performance.
Google Lens Search: Users can now search images and text on-screen using Google Lens directly from Chrome, with screenshots processed on Google’s servers for privacy.

Extended Auto-Update Opt-In: ChromeOS offers a 10-year update policy for security and performance. Certain older devices can opt-in for extended support.
Digital Zoom with Super Resolution: Built-in camera app supports digital zoom on select high-performance devices with AI-based image enhancement.
Instant Hotspot Renaming: The Instant Tethering feature is renamed Instant Hotspot, streamlining connectivity setups with Android devices.
Enhanced Firmware Updates: Broader device support for firmware updates, reducing time and complexity for peripheral updates.
New Accessibility Features: Includes support for Supervised User extensions, additional languages for Live Captions and Dictation, and a “Magnifier follows Select-to-Speak” option.

Custom Configurations for Policies: Allows admins to set up Chrome policies not listed in the Admin Console via JSON scripts, offering flexibility in policy management.
Interactive Setup Guides: New, hands-on guides in Chrome Enterprise Core to support administrators with tasks such as browser enrollment and policy configuration.
New Policies Added: Includes policies for managing device auto-updates, controlling file access, and specifying screen capture locations.

For more details, visit the official release notes: Chrome Enterprise Release Notes.