Chrome can help you fill in forms securely - everywhere on the web. Whether it is your username and password to sign in to your email account, or your credit card number when you’re about to purchase your new favorite pair of sneakers. Today we’re announcing new tools to make your Autofill experience even more convenient and secure.

Confirming credit cards with biometrics

If you choose to save credit cards to your Google Account, your payment information is only transferred to Chrome when it is needed for a transaction. This is why Chrome asks you to confirm your credit card by entering its CVC before the full credit card number is autofilled into a form.

Going forward, Chrome will allow you to enroll your device to retrieve card numbers via biometric authentication, such as your fingerprint. You still need to provide your CVC the first time you use your credit card, but for future transactions, you will be able to confirm your credit card using biometric authentication ᠆ instead of requiring you to pull out your wallet and type in its CVC. Biometric authentication is optional. You can choose to confirm your card with its CVC and you can also turn this feature on and off in Chrome Settings at any time.

Chrome uses the W3C standard WebAuthn to securely enroll you for biometric authentication. Biometric information never leaves your device. The feature is already available on Windows and Mac and is coming to Chrome on Android in the coming weeks.

Biometric authentication for payment methods in Chrome on Android.


Touch-to-fill for passwords


Chrome’s password manager can help you save passwords for the sites you visit so that you don’t need to memorize them. It also helps you fill your passwords the next time you sign in. A big advantage of using a password manager is that it helps prevent phishing attacks, because it cannot be tricked into filling your password into look-alike websites.



Whenever you sign in, Chrome’s new touch-to-fill feature presents your saved accounts for the current website in a convenient and recognizable dialog. It allows for one-handed sign-in without requiring you to scroll to the respective form fields to choose an account.

Signing in is now easier with touch-to-fill controls.


The feature is coming to Chrome on Android in the coming weeks, but this is only the start. We’ll continue to focus on creating intuitive features that keep you safe while you sign-in and pay on the web, and look forward to sharing more in the future.

Patrick Nepper, Google Chrome Product Manager 
Stan Li, Google Payments Product Manager


We think adding this metadata to PDFs is a perfect fit for Chrome, because that information is already available in well-structured, accessible web pages. We hope this helps make more content exported from Chrome to be accessible to even more users.



Organizations that publish content for the general public online often require that all of their PDFs are accessible, either as a matter of policy or to comply with local laws such as Section 508 in the U.S.  Unfortunately, a lot of software programs that are otherwise great for authoring content don't have any support for directly generating a tagged PDF. In these cases, separate remediation software or services are used to make PDFs compliant. By building this into Chrome, we're hoping some organizations that already use HTML as part of their document workflow might be able to take advantage of this new functionality and generate compliant PDFs more easily. This feature also works with Chrome Headless when you use both the --print-to-pdf and --export-tagged-pdf flags.



When we started our journey to make PDFs more accessible, we reached out to the experts - CommonLook, an organization that's been offering PDF accessibility software and services for more than 20 years and which is active in setting PDF standards. We made use of CommonLook's PDF Validator and consulted with them to ensure we were focusing our efforts on the areas that would have the biggest impact.



"To improve the accessibility of PDF documents in Chrome, Google reached out to CommonLook because of our expertise in PDF accessibility. At the time, we recognized the potential impact on PDF accessibility due to the massive number of Chrome users around the world. Two years later, we are pleased to announce that significant progress has been made, and now Chrome is rolling out this feature to all users every time they generate a PDF from Chrome. We will continue to support Google as they work to make Chrome more accessible to all their users." - Monir ElRayes, President and CEO, CommonLook



This feature is rolling out as an experiment. Use chrome://flags/#export-tagged-pdf if you'd like to try it out before it's enabled automatically for all users.



While this is an important milestone, we're not done. Future work includes both improving the quality of generated tagged PDFs, and also improving Chrome's built-in PDF reader to better consume tagged PDFs.




Posted by Dominic Mazzoni, technical lead for Chrome accessibility.

Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 85 is beta as of July 23, 2020.

Fetch Upload Streaming

Fetch upload streaming lets web developers make a fetch with a ReadableStream body. Starting in Chrome 85, it's available for an origin trial.

Previously, you could only start a request once you had the whole body ready to go. But now, you can start sending data while you're still generating the content, improving performance and memory usage.

For example, an online form could initiate a fetch as soon as a user focuses a text input field. By the time the user clicks enter, fetch() headers would already have been sent. This feature also allows you to send content as it's generated on the client, such as audio and video. For more information, see Streaming requests with the fetch API.

See the Origin Trials section for information on signing up and for a list of other origin trials starting in this release. This origin trial is expected to run through Chrome 87 in January 2021.

WebHID API

Note: At the time this was originally published, WebHID was scheduled to begin an origin trial in Chrome 85. The timeline has since been pushed back to Chrome 86.

There is a long tail of human interface devices (HIDs) that are too new, too old, or too uncommon to be accessible by systems' device drivers. The WebHID API solves this by providing a way to implement device-specific logic in JavaScript. 

An HID is one that takes input from or provides output to humans. Examples of devices include keyboards, pointing devices (mice, touchscreens, etc.), and gamepads.

The inability to access uncommon or unusual HID devices is particularly painful when it comes to gamepad support. Gamepad inputs and outputs are not well standardized and web browsers often require custom logic for specific devices. This is unsustainable and results in poor support for the long tail of older and uncommon devices.

We're working on an article to show you how to use the new API. In the meantime, we've found some demos from a few eager engineers that you can use to try the new API. To see those demos, check out Human interface devices on the web: a few quick examples.

See the Origin Trials section for information on signing up and for a list of other origin trials starting in this release. This origin trial is expected to run through Chrome 87 in January 2021.

Windows Support for getInstalledRelatedApps()

The navigator.getInstalledRelatedApps() method determines whether a site's corresponding native app is installed. This allows customization of a user experience for already-installed apps. For example, users can be redirected from a product marketing page directly into an app. Functionality can be centralized to prevent users from seeing duplicate notifications and save developers from maintaining two code bases. Sites can even avoid prompting for installation of a PWA if a native app is already on a user's device.

It does all this while protecting user privacy. Entries in the web app manifest and the Android manifest file ensure that sites cannot use the API to request arbitrary information about users' installed apps.

This method was implemented on Android in Chrome 80. Starting in Chrome 85, it's available on Microsoft Windows. This addition is the result of work from Microsoft. For details on using this method, see Is your app installed? getInstalledRelatedApps() will tell you!.

@property

CSS Houdini is a set of APIs and CSS features that exposes the CSS rendering engine. It lets developers create new CSS features without waiting for a native implementation in browsers. CSS Houdini's @property rule is part of the CSS Properties and Values API, which allows defining custom properties with inheritance, type checking, and default values. The first part of this API, CSS.registerProperty(), was implemented in Chrome 78. That method's capabilities are now available in stylesheets through the @property.

Take the image below, for example. What you're seeing is a transition created with a CSS custom property. In addition to being impossible without the new API, this transition is also type safe. For more information, see @property: giving superpowers to CSS variables.

Origin Trials

In addition to those listed above, this version of Chrome introduces the new origin trials described below. Origin trials allow you to try new features and give feedback on usability, practicality, and effectiveness to the web standards community. To register for any of the origin trials currently supported in Chrome, including the ones described below, visit the Origin Trials dashboard. To learn more about origin trials themselves, visit the Origin Trials Guide for Web Developers.

New Origin Trials

Declarative Shadow DOM

A declarative API to allow the creation of shadow roots using only HTML and no JavaScript. This API allows Web Components that use Shadow DOM to also make use of server-side rendering (SSR), to get rendered content on screen quickly without requiring JavaScript for shadow root attachment. The origin trial is expected to run through Chrome 87 in January 2020.

RTCRtpEncodingParameters.adaptivePtime Property

The RTCRtpEncodingParameters.adaptivePtime property lets a sender in a real-time communication (RTC) system enable or disable adaptive packet rates. Because the packet rate is a big determining factor to the overall bitrate of an audio stream, an optimal congestion control is needed to adapt the packet rate. The audio packet rate is analogous to the video frame rate, which also plays an important role in the video bitrate adaptation.

Although adaptive packet rate may be ubiquitously beneficial, we need this API for applications to enable and disable it, since, otherwise, it may introduce interoperability problems. Some implementations have taken a fixed packet rate as an assumption, and thus may fail or perform sub-optimally with an adaptive packet rate. The origin trial is expected to run through Chrome 87 in January 2021.

Portals

Portals enable seamless navigations between sites or pages by allowing a page to show another page as an inset. For more information, see Hands-on with Portals: seamless navigation on the Web. The origin trial is expected to run through Chrome 86 in early November.

Other Features in this Release

App Shortcuts

App shortcuts are now available on desktop in addition to Android, which debuted in Chrome 84. This feature improves users' productivity and facilitates reengagement with key tasks by providing quick access to common actions. For sites that are already Progressive Web Apps, creating shortcuts requires only adding items to the web app manifest. This addition is the result of work from Microsoft. For more information, see Get things done quickly with app shortcuts.

Autoupgrade Mixed Content

Chrome is now auto-upgrading images served over HTTP from HTTPS sites by rewriting URLs to HTTPS without falling back to HTTP when secure content is not available. Chrome has been auto-upgrading audio and video content since version 80.

AVIF Image Decode

Adds support for decoding AVIF content natively using existing AV1 decoders. AVIF is a next generation image format standardized by the Alliance for Open Media. There are three primary motivations for supporting AVIF:

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