Google cancelled its plan to stop third-party cookies in the browser.

After years of delay, Google said on Monday it would no longer cancel and replace third-party cookies used by advertisers, which have been a longstanding practice.

In a Monday blog post, Google said it had received feedback from advertisers and regulators that prompted its latest decision to cancel its plan to delete third-party cookies in the browser.

Cookies are small pieces of code sent to a visitor’s browser by a website and retained when the visitor visits other websites. The practice has helped develop the digital advertising ecosystem, providing the ability to track users across multiple websites to target ads.

In 2020, Google said it would end support for these cookies in 2022 once it figured out how to meet the needs of users, publishers and advertisers and to provide tools to simplify workarounds.

To that end, Google launched its Privacy Sandbox plan to find a solution that would protect user privacy while allowing content to be freely available on the open web.

In January, Google said it was “very confident” about progress on a replacement for cookies, including “federated learning”, which groups people based on similar browsing behavior, meaning only “federated IDs” rather than individual user IDs would be used to target them.

But in June 2021, Google pushed back its timeline to give the digital advertising industry more time to develop privacy-aware targeting plans. Then in 2022, the company said feedback showed advertisers needed more time to transition to Google’s cookie replacements because some said it would have a significant impact on their businesses.

In a Monday blog post, Google said it had realized through testing that the transition would require “a lot of work from many participants” and would affect publishers, advertisers and most people involved in online advertising.

“We will not abandon third-party cookies, but instead introduce a new experience in Chrome where people can make informed choices about their browsing when they browse the web, and they can adjust their choices at any time,” said Anthony Chavez, Google’s privacy sandbox plan director. “We are discussing this new path with regulators, and when we launch this path, we will engage with the industry.”