Back in October of last year, Google announced its plans to drop support for legacy versions of TLS with Chrome version 81. Today, the company highlighted how it will begin to deprecate the technology in its browser in the months leading to the full removal.
Google will start preparing users and developers for the end of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 with Chrome 79, which will display a warning next to the address bar in pages that are using old versions of the protocol. Chrome 79 will be released to the Stable channel on January 13, 2020, and it should give some time for developers to transition to newer versions of the protocol.
The full removal of support for legacy versions of TLS will come, as announced, with version 81, which is expected sometime in March of next year. With that version of Chrome, connections to websites using unsupported versions of the protocol will be blocked, displaying a full interstitial page.
Google isn"t alone in removing support for old and potentially unsafe versions of TLS. Mozilla has recently removed it in the Nightly builds of its own browser, and Microsoft also promised back in October of last year that it would drop support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in early 2020. The schedule interestingly aligns with Google"s, and, in hindsight, could even have been a hint at the fact that Edge would soon be based on the Chromium engine.