GoogleBot is now running Chrome 78, this started as soon as this past Friday, on November 1st. The stable version of Chrome 78 was released on October 22nd, so this came to the evergreen GoogleBot came about ten days later.
Bastian Grimm first notified me of this on Twitter and Valentin Pletzer's tracking tool is now also showing the change.
But there might be an issue with GoogleBot's support as Bastian wrote:
Question for @JohnMu or @g33konaut - it seems that Evengreen Googlebot (on Chrome 78) doesn't attach auth header tokens when doing POST anymore, so CSRF security settings won't let requests pass. Any idea why that has been changed? (worked well up until 77)
— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) November 1, 2019
He added:
Yikes. I'll see if that's something on our end
— Martin Splitt @ 🔜🇮🇩#jakarta #wmconf (@g33konaut) November 1, 2019
As you can see, Martin Splitt from Google is investigating.
Update on this:
@rustybrick btw: We couldn't reproduce the issue so far, might have been an unrelated thing :)
— Martin Splitt @ 🇮🇩#jakarta #wmcjkt (@g33konaut) November 5, 2019
Forum discussion at Twitter.