Chrome 88: Digital Goods, Lighting Estimation in Augmented Reality, and More
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 88 is beta as of December 3, 2020.
Chrome now supports an API for querying and managing digital products to facilitate in-app purchases from web applications. This is used with the Payment Request API, which is used to make the actual purchases. The API would be linked to a digital distribution service connected via the user agent. In Chromium, this is specifically a web API wrapper around the Android Play Billing API.
This is needed so that web apps in the Play Store can accept purchases for digital goods. (Play policies prevent them from accepting payment via any other method.) Without this, websites that sell digital goods are not installable through the Play Store. In Chrome 88, this is available for Android in an origin trial. For a list of other origin trials starting in this release, see below. This version of Chrome introduces the origin trial 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. Allows sites to query for estimates of the environmental lighting conditions within WebXR sessions. This exposes both spherical harmonics representing the ambient lighting, as well as a cubemap texture representing "reflections". Adding lighting estimation can help to make models feel more natural and like they "fit" better with the user's environment. This can make them feel more "real" or "natural".
In Chrome 88, this is available for Android only.
The following features, previously in Chrome origin trials, are now enabled by default. Adds the performance.measureMemory() method that estimates the memory usage of the web page in case the page is currently isolated (e.g. on Desktop). Because the method is gated behind COOP/COEP web sites need to enabled crossOriginIsolated to use this method. For more information, see Monitor your web page's total memory usage with measureMemory().
Adds the ability to request unadjusted/unaccelerated mouse movement data when in To mitigate "tab-napping" attacks, in which a new tab/window opened by a victim context may navigate that opener context, anchors that target Dark mode is an accessibility feature that allows web authors to enable their web pages to be viewed in dark mode. When enabled, users are able to view dark mode supported websites by toggling the dark mode settings on their OS. The benefits of dark mode are being easier on the eyes in a low light environment and lower battery consumption. For more about dark mode and form controls, see Improved dark mode default styling with the color-scheme CSS property and the corresponding meta tag.
Adds the Allows explicitly specifying an aspect ratio for any element to get similar behavior to a replaced element. This generalizes the aspect ratio concept to general elements. It allows various effects, examples include sizing Allows complex selectors inside the When adopting a shadow root into a A new attribute on This feature was mostly driven, at least initially, by the declarative Shadow DOM feature introduction. With declarative Shadow DOM, there was a problem with closed shadow roots: declarative shadow content loads before the custom element is upgraded, which means that closed shadow content would have been inaccessible. The Origin isolation allows developers to opt in to giving up certain cross-origin same-site access capabilities—namely synchronous scripting via Adds support for The Transceivers allow the sending and/or receiving of media in WebRTC. Stopping a transceiver makes it permanently inactive and frees its network port, encoder, and decoder resources. This also makes its This version of Chrome incorporates version 8.8 of the V8 JavaScript engine. It specifically includes the change listed below. You can find a complete list of recent features in the V8 release notes. Adds the JavaScript type The primary use case for For more information, see Making your website "cross-origin isolated" using COOP and COEP.
This version of Chrome introduces the deprecations and removals listed below. Visit ChromeStatus.com for lists of current deprecations and previous removals.
Digital Goods API
Origin Trials
New Origin Trials
WebXR: AR Lighting Estimation
Completed Origin Trials
performance.measureMemory() Method
PointerLock unadjustedMovement
PointerLock. If unadjustedMovement is set to true, then the pointer movements will not be affected by the underlying platform modifications such as mouse acceleration. For more information, see Disable mouse acceleration to provide a better FPS gaming experience.
Other features in this release
Anchor target=_blank implies rel=noopener by Default
_blank will behave as though rel is set to noopener. To opt out of this behavior, you can set rel to opener. This conforms to a change in the HTML standard.
Dark Mode Form Controls and Scrollbars
AbortSignal in addEventListener()
AbortSignal option, named signal, to the options parameter of addEventListener(). The signal option must first be created by an AbortController by accessing the signal property on an AbortController instance. Once the signal is passed in to addEventListener(), calling AbortController.abort() removes the event listener added with addEventListener().
CSS aspect-ratio Property
<iframe> elements using an aspect ratio, filmstrips where each element has the same height but needs an appropriate width, and cases where a replaced element is wrapped by a component but should keep the aspect ratio.
CSS Selectors 4: Complex :not()
:not() pseudo class, such as :not(.a + .b .c).
Don't Clear adoptedStyleSheets on Adoption to/from <template>
<template> document from a document that the <template> is in (or vice versa), Chrome will no longer clear its adoptedStyleSheets.
Currently Chrome always clears adoptedStyleSheets when the shadow root containing it is adopted into a different document. This ensures that constructed stylesheets are not used across <iframe> elements, but this also covers adopting into/from <template> elements, causing some confusion for the web developer.
ElementInternals.shadowRoot Attribute
ElementInternals, shadowRoot, allows custom elements to access their own shadow root, regardless of open/closed status. Additionally, further restrictions are added to the attachInternals() method to ensure that custom elements get the first chance to attach the ElementInternals interface. With this change, the attachInternals() method will throw an exception if called before the custom element constructor being run.
In addition to the declarative Shadow DOM use case, this feature also offers a convenience to custom element authors, who no longer need to keep a reference to attached shadow roots, and can instead use the ElementInternals interface.
Make Type Optional in WakeLock.request()
type parameter in WakeLock.request() is now optional and defaults to "screen", which is currently the only allowed value. For more information, see Stay awake with the Screen Wake Lock API.
Origin Isolation
document.domain, and calling postMessage() with WebAssembly.Module instances. This gives the browser more flexibility in implementation technologies.
Reasons why a site may want better isolation include: performance isolation, allocations of large amounts of memory, side-channel protection (e.g. against Spectre), and improved memory measurement.
path() Support in clip-path CSS Property
path() as a value for the CSS clip-path property, which allows specifying SVG-style paths for clipping. This supplements the four basic shapes currently supported by clip-path: circle, ellipse, polygon, and url. For example, the following would clip an element with a triangle:
clip-path: path(oddeven, 'M 5 5 h 100 v 100 Z')
Permissions-Policy Header
Permissions-Policy HTTP header replaces the existing Feature-Policy header for controlling delegation of permissions and powerful features. The header uses a structured syntax, and allows sites to more tightly restrict which origins can be granted access to features.
RTCRtpTransceiver.stop()
m= section in the SDP reusable by future transceivers, preventing the SDP from growing indefinitely as transceivers are added and removed. This is part of "Perfect Negotiation", which makes signaling in WebRTC race free and less error-prone.
JavaScript
Shared Array Buffers, Atomics, and Futex APIs
SharedArrayBuffer gated behind COOP/COEP. A SharedArrayBuffer allows a message to be posted to a worker by sending a reference instead of a copy of the sent data.
JavaScript Atomics provides atomic loads and stores and read/modify/write accesses to SharedArrayBuffer objects. Atomics.wait() provides the ability for a worker to wait for another worker to signal it, without having to spinlock.SharedArrayBuffer is for asm.js code, but it is also useful for implementing other higher-level sharing between Workers.Deprecations, and Removals
Don't Allow Popups During Page Unload (Enterprises)
