Google is working to fix Drive download issues

Google has announced that, starting from January 2, 2024, Google Drive will no longer require the activation of third-party cookies for file downloads.

This announcement comes as Google is finally preparing to disable third-party cookies by default in its Chrome browser, following a similar move made by other browser producers such as Mozilla and Apple to enhance privacy, according to a report published on The Verge.

This change is expected to resolve an annoying issue in Google Drive where users may have faced difficulty downloading files if third-party cookies were disabled.

In the event that users encounter this problem, the official advice from Google's support page will be to manually create an exception for Google Drive to allow third-party cookies.

The blog post from Google does not explicitly state why Google Drive currently relies on third-party cookies. However, speculations suggest that the reason could be related to using the service for a separate domain to host content that users upload as a security measure, with cookies subsequently used to verify permission for downloading a specific file.