What's New in WebData Control 4.6

Earlier this month at Avanite we released our latest version of WebData Control, version 4.6 Sp1. In this blog we are going to highlight the key changes introduced as part of this release.

Edge Chromium Support

In 2019 Microsoft announced to the world that they where working on a new Chromium based browser and in early 2020 it was officially released.

As part of our WebData Control 4.6 release we have added support for the new Microsoft Edge Chromium browser across all our features. Including: WebData Management, Browser Redirector and Favorites Synchronization.

WebData Management on Browser Exit

In earlier versions of WebData Control our WebData Management feature was only able to process the clean-up of web data as the user logged off their machine. Version 4.6 has introduced an enhancement to this by allowing users web data to be cleared when the browser is closed for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and the new Microsoft Edge Chromium browser. 

This new setting is configured in Group Policy using the “Enable WebData Management” policy:

Avanite Cookie File and Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Within WebData Management we use a cookie definitions file which contains a list of known tracking, advertising and analytics cookies which add no value to end users.  This ensures that WebData Management is using our most up to date information when processing the relevant browser cookie data.

One question which we were asked by our customers is “How do I get the latest version of you Cookie Configuration file?”.

Prior to version 4.6 customers had to manually request an update to their cookie configuration file or receive it as part of a WebData Control upgrade.

In version 4.6 we have created a mechanism for WebData Management to download the latest cookie configuration file from our Microsoft Azure CDN. Ensuring that our customers are always up to date with the latest cookie configuration file.

Cookie Clean-up: Http-Only and Secure Cookies

Finally, as part of our 4.6 release we have included additional granularity around our cookie management features by introducing policies to remove cookies which are not Http-Only or Secure cookies.

Secure cookies are ones which have the Secure attribute set, which limits the scope of the cookie to "secure" channels such as http(s).

Http-Only cookies are ones which have the HttpOnly attribute set, which instructs the browser not to display the cookie through client-side scripts.

You can download WebData Control Version 4.6 Sp1 now.

The latest version of WebData Control is now available on our website here.