Network Quality Estimator API

The Network Infomation API has been available in previous versions of Chrome, but has only provided theoretical network speeds given the type of a user's connection. In this release, the API has been expanded to provide developers with network performance metrics as experienced by the client. Using the API, a developer can inspect the current expected round trip time and throughput and be notified of performance changes. To simplify application logic, the API also summarizes measured network performance as the cellular connection type (e.g. 2G) most similar to it, even if the actual connection is WiFi or Ethernet.


Using these network quality signals, developers can tailor content to network constraints. For example, on very slow connections, developers can serve a simplified version of the page to improve page load times.  These signals will also soon be available as HTTP request headers and enabled via Client Hints.

OpenType Variable Fonts

OpenType Font Variations bring new typographic capabilities to the web. Previously, one font file contained just a single instance of a font family, including only one weight (Regular, Bold, Black…) or one stretch (Normal, Condensed, Expanded…).
Figure: Animated Amstelvar and Decovar variable font examples


With variable fonts, responsive design on the web now extends to typography. OpenType Variations provide a continuous spectrum of stylistic variations while saving space and bandwidth, since they all load from a single compact font file. Stretch, style, and weight can be adjusted using the respective updated CSS properties which now allow numeric values. Fine tuning of variation axis parameters, such as weight or width, is possible using the font-variation-settings CSS property.

Media Capture from DOM Elements

The W3C Media Capture from DOM Elements API now allows sites to live-capture content in the form of a MediaStream directly from HTMLMediaElements (i.e. <video> and <audio>). By invoking the captureStream() method on HTMLMediaElements, streamed content can be recorded and sent remotely using WebRTC, processed with WebAudio, or manipulated in various other ways.
Figure: A 3D rendering being live-captured and streamed to a peer connection using WebRTC.

Other features in this release

  • The Payment Request API is now available on Chrome for iOS.
  • DOM interfaces are now supported for the <data> and <time> HTML elements to give developers a native, machine-readable way to store client-side content.
  • The CSS color parser now supports 8- and 4-digit hex colors of the format #RRGGBBAA and #RGBA.
  • Lookbehind assertions are now available in addition to lookaheads, so developers can use regular expressions to ensure that a pattern is or isn’t preceded by another, e.g. matching a dollar amount without capturing the dollar sign.
  • A new WebVR Origin Trial is now available, enabling developers to experiment with building rich Virtual Reality experiences on the web.
  • Following previous announcements, the “Not secure” warning will now be displayed when users enter data on an HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode.
  • The `tabindex` attribute now enables the on-screen keyboard on Chrome for Android to more easily navigate between the next and previous fields within a form, thanks to a contribution from Samsung.
  • Developers can now use the s flag to enable dotAll mode in ECMAScript regular expressions, making “.” match any character, including line terminators.
  • Uploading images on Chrome for Android has an improved user experience and multi-select support that triggers on any site that invokes <input type="file"> with an accept attribute specifying that only images are accepted.

Deprecations and interoperability improvements

  • Following an update to native button appearance on macOS, the appearance of <input> buttons and the <button> element have been similarly changed, affecting the default values for the background-color,  border,  border-radius, and padding CSS properties.
  • The ability to request permission to show notifications has been removed over HTTP connections and within cross-origin iframes, in line with our policy on restricting powerful features to only HTTPS.
  • To increase accuracy and ensure that users receive content in the language they expect, base language is now added immediately after language+region when generating accept-language headers from language settings.
  • To improve UX and browser consistency, transitional mouse events will now be dispatched, and hover states will now be updated more quickly after the intended layout has been modified.
  • OfflineAudioContext now accepts a dictionary argument, in addition to the existing constructor that takes three separate arguments.
  • In line with other browsers, the getStreamById method on RTCPeerConnection has now been removed.
  • SharedWorker.workerStart has been removed, following its deprecation and removal from other major browsers.
  • To better conform to spec, the default value of <ol>.start has been set to 1.

Posted by Ben Greenstein and Tarun Bansal, The Network’s Watch
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By default, when users install Chrome, they receive the most stable and supported build available. However, Chrome fans and web developers have long been able to opt into new Chrome features by installing pre-release packages such as Chrome Beta and Dev. Historically it's been impossible to install these pre-releases on the same computer as stable Chrome, forcing developers to choose between testing their site in the next version of Chrome and experiencing their site as users see it now.

Starting today, Chrome Beta and Chrome Dev can be installed on the same Windows computer as stable Chrome and run simultaneously, allowing developers to more easily test their site across multiple versions of Chrome. This means side-by-side Chrome installation is available on Windows, Android, and Linux, and will be made available on other platforms in future releases.


Chrome, Chrome Beta, and Chrome Dev can now be installed side by side on the same Windows computer. 

To install Chrome Beta or Chrome Dev, visit the Chromium release channels page. If you already have Chrome Dev or Beta and wish to run it side-by-side with stable Chrome, you'll need to uninstall it and then reinstall from this page. To easily transfer your bookmarks, settings, and other data, sign in to Chrome before you uninstall. And if you see something not quite right in Chrome Dev or Beta, please send us feedback.

Posted by Greg Thompson, Bitmason
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JavaScript modules
Modules allow developers to declare a script's dependencies and are already popular in third-party build tools, which use them to bundle only the required scripts. This release adds native support for JavaScript modules via the new <script type=module> element.
Native support means the browser can fetch granular dependencies in parallel, taking advantage of caching, avoiding duplications across the page, and ensuring the script executes in the correct order, all without a build step.
To get started, learn more about JavaScript modules and the aspects of the JavaScript language affected by modules.

Payment Request API on desktop

The Payment Request API is now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and ChromeOS, following the announcement of Android support last year. Developers can now offer secure, seamless checkout experiences across platforms. To get started, “check out” our integration guide.
The PaymentRequest process throughout a transaction.

Web Share API

To allow users to easily share content on social networks, developers have had to manually integrate sharing buttons into their site for each social service. This often leads to users not being able to share with the services they actually use, in addition to bloated page sizes and security risks from including third-party code.
Sites can now use the new navigator.share API on Chrome for Android to trigger the native Android share dialog, allowing the user to easily share text or links with any of their installed native apps. In a future release, this API will also be able to share to installed web apps.
The navigator.share API allows the user to share content with a variety of native apps via the native Android share dialog.

WebUSB

Most hardware peripherals such as keyboards, mice, printers, and gamepads are supported by high-level web platform APIs. To use specialized educational, scientific, or industrial USB peripherals, users must find and install potentially unsafe drivers and software with system-level privileges.
Chrome now supports the WebUSB API, allowing web apps to communicate with peripherals given a user's consent. This enables all the functionality provided by these devices, while still preserving the security guarantees of the web.

Other features in this release

  • The Network Information API is now available on desktop as well as Android, enabling sites to access the underlying connection information of a device.
  • Developers can now specify scrolling smoothness via a new optional parameter in existing Scroll APIs or with the scroll-behavior CSS property.
  • The CSSOM View Smooth Scroll API brings native smooth scrolling to the platform through a the scroll-behavior: smooth CSS property or by using the window.scrollTo() DOM scroll method, eliminating the need to implement this behavior with JavaScript
  • CSS color values can now be 8- and 4-digit hex colors of the format #RRGGBBAA and #RGBA.
  • Sites can now access the relative positions of the screen content with the Visual Viewport API, exposing complex functionality like pinch-and-zoom in a more direct way.
  • The Device RAM API is now available, exposing the amount of RAM on a user’s device to sites to optimize overall performance of a web application.
  • When navigating from an installed web app to a site outside the initial web app’s scope, the new site now automatically loads in a Custom Chrome Tab.
  • For video using native controls, Chrome will now automatically expand video to fullscreen when a user rotates their device in an orientation that matches a video playing on the screen.
  • nextHopProtocol is now available in Resource Timing and Navigation Timing, providing access to the network protocol used to fetch a resource.  
  • Sites can now require embedded third-party content to enforce a given Content Security Policy via the new csp attribute on <iframe> elements.
  • The DOMTokenList interface now supports replace() to easily change all identical tokens to a new one, such as active to inactive on expiration.
  • To access a list of attribute names of an element, getAttributeNames() is now supported and gives developers a more direct mechanism than going through the attributes collection.
  • To increase security, sites will now automatically exit full screen if a JavaScript dialog opens.
  • Sites can now access an estimate for the disk space used by a given origin and quota in bytes via the Storage API’s new navigator.storage.estimate() function.
  • To improve the browser’s cache hit rate, URLSearchParams now supports sort() to list all stored name-value pairs.
  • The URLSearchParams constructor has been updated to accept any object as a parameter instead of only other URLSearchParams instances.
  • To prevent the use of mis-issued certificates from going unnoticed, sites can use the new Expect-CT HTTP header which will enable automated reporting and/or enforcement of Certificate Transparency requirements.
  • Chrome will no longer decode frames for videos using Media Source in background tabs.
  • "Non-Live" camera settings such as photo resolution, red eye reduction, and flash mode can now be retrieved with ImageCapture.getPhotoSettings().
  • Sites can now use the Clear-Site-Data header to delete their own client-side data, such as cookies, service workers, storage, and cache entries.

Deprecations and interoperability improvements

  • To increase security, resources with URLs containing both \n and < characters will now be blocked.
  • To increase security, support for the Presentation API’s start function has been deprecated and removed for insecure contexts.
  • To align with the spec and preserve browser consistency, the scrollingElement is now the documentElement in standards mode.
  • To increase consistency across on<event> attributes, onwheel attributes have been moved from Element to Window, Document, HTMLElement, and SVGElement.
  • To better follow spec and provide more granular control over the flow of referred content, Chrome now supports three new Referrer Policy values, same-origin, strict-origin, and strict-origin-when-cross-origin.
  • Following the change in spec, the maximum value for colSpan has been decreased from 8190 to 1000.

Posted by Domenic Denicola, Maverick Modulator
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