Google Drive's third-party cookies change broke HTML embeds, but there's a potential workaround

05:50 pm (IST): In a new turn of events, the bug report has again been labeled as “Won’t fix (Intended behavior)” by the dev team. Below is the detailed response they offered in this regard:

Closing this issue as working as intended. I tried to buy some more time with team owning this to no avail. Some points:

• Related to phase out of third party cookies. October 2023 Blog Post
• This was never an officially supported usage. (Same for lh3.google.com, thumbnail links mentioned above, etc)

As to options going forward:

• Use the embed pattern described in the above blog post or here
• Move files to a location designed for hosting, e.g. Google Cloud Storage or any number of hosting providers for static content
• Proxy the files through the Google Drive API using your own infrastructure, e.g. Google Cloud Functions, watch out for egress costs and hot linking, probably want a CDN too
• Use a hosted proxy service as mentioned above

Original article follows:

In recent days, several people have been reporting that multimedia content (images, videos, and audios) embedded from Google Drive using HTML code is not loading, which is ‘breaking’ websites since the place where content used to load now only shows a small placeholder of ‘broken element’. The problem is affecting the loading of content directly on the websites, but they load correctly if you right-click on the placeholder and click on ‘open in another tab/window’.

An issue of this type does not only affect website owners or administrators but also normal users who usually visit forums. That said, a user received a response from Google Workspace Support about the issue, where they confirmed that everything is due to a third-party cookie change implemented at the beginning of this month. The tweak is already posted on the Workspace blog and mentions the following:

Use an iframe (HTML element that loads another HTML page within the document) on your website to load the content. You can do this by going to the file in Drive and taking the next relevant step:

– For Workspace files (Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms file types) use the Google Docs publishing URL of the file.

– For other files, once opened in Drive, select “Open in new window” from the overflow menu, and then open the overflow menu and select “Embed item…”, which provides the iframe HTML tag.

Source

However, it seems that the implementation of the change was not successful and is causing the problem where HTML embeds from Google Drive are just not working. There are websites that are more affected since they were almost entirely designed based on HTML media embeds from Google Drive, so practically all the elements are broken or not loading in those cases, which can be especially serious in online stores, for example.

It seems that, at least at first, the dev team did not consider this a bug but rather an intended behavior, which is why they even labeled the report as ‘Won’t fix’. However, it seems that the numerous reports that have emerged non-stop since then made them reconsider the situation, and currently the bug report is labeled as ‘Assigned’, so they are working on it, although there is no ETA for a fix yet.

That said, as a potential workaround to mitigate the issue, an individual recommended using Google Drive file thumbnails with a large width instead of the original full-size images. However, as expected, this will affect the image quality, so action from the dev team is required to get everything working normally again, and we hope it doesn’t take much longer.