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 91 is beta as of April 22, 2021.

Origin Trials

This version of Chrome introduces the 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 Chrome Origin Trials dashboard. To learn more about origin trials in Chrome, visit the Origin Trials Guide for Web Developers. Microsoft Edge runs its own origin trials separate from Chrome. To learn more, see the Microsoft Edge Origin Trials Developer Console.

New Origin Trials

Declarative Link Capturing for PWAs

The new Web App Manifest member called capture_links controls what happens when the user navigates to a page within scope of an installed web app. It allows sites to automatically open a new PWA window when the user clicks a link to their app or to have a single window mode like mobile apps. Sign up for the origin trial and learn more on the origin trial dashboard.

WebTransport

WebTransport is a protocol framework that enables clients constrained by the Web security model to communicate with a remote server using a secure multiplexed transport.

Currently, Web application developers have two APIs for bidirectional communications with a remote server: WebSockets and RTCDataChannel. WebSockets are TCP-based, thus having all of the drawbacks of TCP (head of line blocking, lack of support for unreliable data transport) that make it a poor fit for latency-sensitive applications. RTCDataChannel is based on the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), which does not have these drawbacks; however, it is designed to be used in a peer-to-peer context, which causes its use in client-server settings to be fairly low. WebTransport provides a client-server API that supports bidirectional transfer of both unreliable and reliable data, using UDP-like datagrams and cancellable streams. WebTransport calls are visible in the Network panel of DevTools and identified as such in the Type column.

For more information, see Experimenting with WebTransport. Sign up for the origin trial and learn more on the origin trial dashboard.

WebXR Plane Detection API

WebXR applications can now retrieve data about planes (flat surfaces) in the user's environment, allowing better user experiences with less processing power. Without this feature plane detection requires custom computer vision algorithms using data from MediaDevices.getUserMedia(). These solutions usually fall short of quality and accuracy expectations for AR experiences and don't support world scale. Sign up for the origin trial and learn more on the dashboard.

Completed Origin Trials

The following features, previously in a Chrome origin trial, are now enabled by default.

WebAssembly SIMD

WebAssembly SIMD exposes hardware SIMD instructions to WebAssembly applications in a platform-independent way. This introduces a new 128-bit type that can represent different types of packed data, and several vector operations that work on packed data. SIMD can boost performance by exploiting data level parallelism and is also useful when compiling native code to WebAssembly. For more information, see the V8 feature explainer for WebAssembly SIMD.

Other features in this release

Align performance API timer resolution to cross-origin isolated capability

Coarsening of performance.now() and related timestamps based on site isolation status is now consistent across platforms. This decreases the resolution on desktop from 5 microseconds to 100 microseconds in non-isolated contexts. It also increases their resolution on Android from 100 microseconds to 5 microseconds in cross-origin isolated contexts, where it's safe to do so.

Clipboard: Read-Only Files Support

On desktop, apps can now read files from the clipboard (but not write files to the clipboard). For files on the clipboard, apps have read-only access. 

async function onPaste(e) {
  let file = e.clipboardData.files[0];
  let contents = await file.text();  
}



CSS


Custom Counter Styles

The CSS @counter-style rule allows web authors to specify and use custom counter styles in list markers and CSS counters. This helps internationalization. This change implements all of the features in CSS Counter Styles Level 3 except: