Chrome Dev Summit 2020: Building an open web for our users and developers

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

We all benefit from an open web that is secure, powerful, and fast. Over the past year, we’ve focused our efforts on strengthening the web in three areas:

Rethinking how we can deliver a safe and secure web
Adding the capabilities you need to build powerful, rich, and diverse applications
Optimizing for performance, for users and developers alike

This post is a synopsis of the updates we shared during today’s keynote at Chrome Dev Summit.

Rethinking privacy from the ground up

We’ve continued work on the Privacy Sandbox and we are committed to developing an open set of standards that fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. Together with the web community, we're building new privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies or other cross-site tracking mechanisms. With the Client Hints API, we’re reducing the fingerprinting surface of Chrome, and we have two solutions for you to experiment with via our Chrome origin trials. The Click Conversion Measurement API measures ad conversions without using cross-site identifiers, and the Trust Token APIs help convey trust from one context to another without passive tracking.

Available as Origin Trials
More info at draft proposal for a number of changes to our extension platform. After incorporating a number of different suggestions from extension developers, we're ready to launch the stable release of Manifest V3 with the goal of increased security, more control and privacy for users, and improved performance.

With Manifest V3, remote hosted code is no longer permissible to prevent malicious extensions that abuse user privacy and security. Additionally, the new extensions model allows users to withhold sensitive permissions at install time. Lastly, a new approach to background logic with the introduction of service workers for background pages and a new declarative model for extension APIs provides users more consistent performance guarantees. Manifest V3 is now available to experiment with on Chrome 88 beta, with the Chrome Web Store accepting Manifest V3 extensions mid-January when Chrome 88 reaches stable.

Bringing powerful capabilities for advanced apps

Great examples are coming to life from developers who are building new experiences on the web. Gravit Designer makes it easy for users to read and write files with File System Access APIs and allows the use of specialized fonts installed locally with the new Local Font Access API. Adobe has made it easy for users to create stunning visual stories and beautifully designed content with their Spark web app.

Today, we are adding new capabilities for Progress Web Apps (PWAs) to increase their discoverability by being listed in the Google Play Store. In Chrome 86 we gave you the ability to list your PWA in the Play Store using a Trusted Web Activity. We’ve now made it possible for you to start accepting payments using the new Digital Goods API in Chrome 88.

Optimizing for performance

Chrome’s performance—speed and usage of resources like power, memory, or CPU—has always been top of mind so you can deliver the best experience for all our users.

Earlier this year, we made some key improvements to speed with Profile Guided Optimization & Tab throttling and today, we announced a significant reduction of V8’s memory footprint. Apart from making great strides in memory savings through V8 pointer compression, we’ve eliminated parsing pauses entirely by loading a webpage’s JavaScript files in parallel, so scripts can be parsed and compiled and ready to execute as soon as they’re needed by the page.

Since we announced our Web Vitals initiative, they are being increasingly used to measure web page performance. Google Search announced new signals to search ranking will include Core Web Vitals starting in May 2021. In addition to the Chrome User Experience Report, Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report, and many other Google tools, other providers like Cloudflare are surfacing Core Web Vitals as web page performance metrics.

Last summer, we released the web-vitals Javascript library for those sites using Google Analytics. Today we announced the Web Vitals Report, an open source website and tool that lets you query and visualize your Web Vitals metrics data in Google Analytics, enabling you to easily compare performance data across segments.

Finally, we’ve been listening to your feedback and hearing about your difficulties in building web interfaces. We’ve been working to improve the web’s styling capabilities and shipped content-visibility, a CSS feature that significantly improves rendering performance. Look for more updates and tools to improve UI styling, including the announcement of Houdini.how, a set of APIs that makes it easier for you to extend CSS.

A virtual gathering experiment

Chrome Dev Summit has always been about connecting with the community. Although we weren’t able to convene together in person, the Chrome team launched a PWA to bring the best parts of a physical conference -- serendipitous conversations, discovering new things, and collecting swag -- to life with Chrome Dev Summit Adventure. We can’t wait to hear what you think of this experiment and look forward to chatting with you in real-time.

Learn more

Become part of the community and join a Google Developer Group around the world. Check out the full list of CDS Extended events that brings together regional developer communities to recap the highlights from Chrome Dev Summit 2020 along with live interactive sessions.

Watch the sessions any time on our YouTube channel and for all the latest updates on the web, sign up for the web.dev newsletter.

See you next year!

Posted by Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer

Manifest V3 now available on M88 Beta

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

With hundreds of millions of people using over 250,000 items in the Chrome Web Store, extensions have become essential to how many of us experience the web and get work done online. We believe extensions must be trustworthy by default, which is why we’ve spent this year making extensions safer for everyone.

Today we’re officially announcing the planned rollout of Manifest V3 for Chrome Extensions, a new version of the extensions platform that makes extensions more secure, performant, and private-respecting by default.

Security

With the introduction of Manifest V3, we will disallow remotely hosted code. This mechanism is used as an attack vector by bad actors to circumvent Google’s malware detection tools and poses a significant risk to user privacy and security.

The removal of remotely hosted code will also allow us to more thoroughly and quickly review submissions to the Chrome Web Store. Developers will then be able to release updates to their users more quickly.

On the extensions team, we believe that a trustworthy Chrome and a trustworthy extensions experience is not only great for users but is also essential for developers. In the long run, Manifest V3 will help the extension ecosystem continue to be a place that people can trust.

Performance

We know that performance is key to a great user experience, and as we began work on the third iteration of our extension platform, performance was a foundational consideration. Two areas where this has manifested are our approach to background logic and API design.

First, we are introducing service workers as a replacement for background pages. Unlike persistent background pages, which remain active in the background and consume system resources regardless of whether the extension is actively using them, service workers are ephemeral. This ephemerality allows Chrome to lower overall system resource utilization since the browser can start up and tear down service workers as needed.

Second, we are moving to a more declarative model for extension APIs in general. In addition to security benefits, this provides a more reliable end-user performance guarantee across the board by eliminating the need for serialization and inter-process communication. The end result is better overall performance and improved privacy guarantees for the vast majority of extension users.

Privacy

To give users greater visibility and control over how extensions use and share their data, we’re moving to an extensions model that makes more permissions optional and allows users to withhold sensitive permissions at install time. Long-term, extension developers should expect users to opt in or out of permissions at any time.

For extensions that currently require passive access to web activity, we’re introducing and continuing to iterate on new functionality that allows developers to deliver these use cases while preserving user privacy. For example, our new declarativeNetRequest API is designed to be a privacy-preserving method for extensions to block network requests without needing access to sensitive data.

The declarativeNetRequest API is an example of how Chrome is working to enable extensions, including ad blockers, to continue delivering their core functionality without requiring the extension to have access to potentially sensitive user data. This will allow many of the powerful extensions in our ecosystem to continue to provide a seamless user experience while still respecting user privacy.

Availability & Continued Iteration

When the Manifest V3 draft proposal was initially shared with the Chromium developer community, we received an abundance of helpful feedback — thank you! We have been working closely with the developers of many extensions — including ad blockers, shopping extensions, productivity enhancements, developer tools, and more — to evolve the platform.

We've used this feedback to improve the functionality and usability of the API surfaces associated with Manifest V3. For example, we have added support to declarativeNetRequest for multiple static rulesets, regular expressions within rules, declarative header modification, and more.

“We’ve been very pleased with the close collaboration established between Google’s Chrome Extensions Team and our own engineering team to ensure that ad-blocking extensions will still be available after Manifest V3 takes effect."

— Sofia Lindberg, Tech Lead, eyeo (Adblock Plus)

Even after Manifest V3 launches, expect more functionality and iteration as we continue to incorporate feedback and add new features to make V3 even more powerful for developers while preserving user privacy. If you are interested in contributing to the conversation, please comment and discuss on the chromium-extensions Google Group.

Manifest V3 is now available to experiment with on Chrome 88 Beta, with additional exciting features to follow in upcoming releases. The Chrome Web Store will start accepting Manifest V3 extensions January, shortly after Chrome 88 reaches stable. While there is not an exact date for removing support for Manifest V2 extensions, developers can expect the migration period to last at least a year from when Manifest V3 lands in the stable channel. We will continue to provide more details about this timeline in the coming months.

Posted by David Li - Product Manager, Chrome & Simeon Vincent - Developer Advocate, Chrome

Easy to build, monetize, and discover: List your web app on Google Play

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

App developers should be able to make money from their creations, whether via ads, purchases, or subscriptions. The first step to successfully monetizing is getting your app discovered.

Now that Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) can be listed in Google Play, we’re excited to announce that web developers can use Google Play payments in their PWA on Chromebooks and Android devices. This makes it even easier to get your PWA in front of more users and start accepting simple, secure payments by listing in Google Play.

A new way to connect with Chromebook users

Since their release, Chromebooks and Chrome OS have proven that a device built around the web can make computing easier, faster, and more secure. Last year, we expanded high-quality app experiences beyond mobile by adding support for PWAs on Chrome OS. And that’s clearly resonated with users — in the past year, Chromebook unit sales have grown 85% year over year (YOY)¹, and PWA installs more than doubled².

With all the new capabilities being added to web apps — from saving to the local file system to device communication — we saw an opportunity to highlight the best experiences for Chromebook users.

Search continues to be a quick and easy way to discover new web apps, but many people are also turning to app stores to find the best software for their device in one place. That’s why we gave developers the ability to list their PWA in Google Play on Chrome OS using Trusted Web Activity. Now, users can discover web apps by browsing through collections and curated recommendations in the Play Store. And once they install it, they’ll be able to enjoy the full-screen app experience they love, powered by Chrome.

Brands like Kapwing, an online image, video, and GIF editing platform, have already seen impressive results after launching their PWA:

"In the first five weeks of launching our PWA-ified website, the number of people creating videos through the PWA grew 36%. This growth in usage outpaced overall growth on the website, indicating higher retention among creators who installed the PWA."

- Julia Enthoven, CEO of Kapwing

Streamlined secure payments

If your app accepts payments, you can simplify the process by using the Digital Goods API with Google Play. This feature is ready to start testing behind a flag in Chrome OS 88 and will launch with Chrome OS 89 in March 2021.

These APIs allow you to offer in-app payments and subscriptions with a single click, and users see the same, familiar Google Play billing flow with the ability to save credits or payment information.

More amazing apps coming to Chrome OS

We’ve already seen great responses to PWAs on Chromebooks — users enjoying the advanced graphics on Adobe Spark and Corel’s Gravit Designer, sharper video editing with Clipchamp, and more powerful viewing experiences on YouTube TV. We’re excited to share that all of these experiences will arrive in the Play Store as soon as the Digital Goods API arrives in Chrome OS 89.

It’s incredible to see the journey of developers as they build their web apps for larger screens. We can’t wait to showcase amazing web apps like these on Google Play — and we hope to see yours there soon!

Posted by PJ McLachlan & Tom Buckley

Sources:
¹ The NPD Group, Inc., U.S. Retail Tracking Service, Notebook Computers, based on unit sales, Jan.–Aug. 2020.
² Chrome usage metrics, Dec. 2019–Dec. 2020.

Seamless payments and password management in Chrome

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Google AccountPassword Manageryour account

Continuing our journey to bring instant experiences to the whole web

Monday, December 7, 2020

trivialNoState Prefetch

Pre-rendering was an all or nothing approach where calls to unsupported web features would result in completely abandoning pre-rendering. The intent was to avoid annoyances such as having sounds or permission prompts coming out of nowhere, but in practice, this meant that most websites were not compatible with pre-rendering and that web developers could inadvertently fall outside of the set of pre-rendering compatible web features, and lose all the benefits as a result.

Not all pages can be safely pre-rendered. For instance, pre-rendering a link to a page that logs you out of your favorite website would be a bad experience. Because it is non trivial to dissociate pages that are consequence-free vs. those that aren’t, this meant that we were only able to safely apply pre-rendering to a narrow subset of links on the web.

“Prefetching websites via a CONNECT proxy prevents leaking user information”

Rebuilding pre-rendering on a solid foundation

As mentioned in the introduction, our goal is to bring instant experiences to the whole web through prefetching and pre-rendering techniques that are privacy and developer friendly. This proof of concept experiment and the follow-up discussions with the community represent small, but nevertheless important, steps toward that goal. Indeed, any pre-rendering feature is inherently built on top of a prefetching capability, which must abide by the same privacy principles. There are a few more challenges that we’ll need to solve to bring back an improved, privacy and developer friendly, pre-rendering feature. To be clear, we see this successful proof of concept experiment as a positive signal for iterating on a viable web platform solution, so that more websites can both benefit from, and take advantage of the approach outlined in this blog post. We are hopeful that what we’ve learned from past efforts, as well as new learnings we’ve gained thanks to this proof-of-concept experiment, will help foster a fruitful collaborative effort with the rest of the community.

Posted by Michael Buettner (Software Engineer), and Kenji Baheux (Product Manager)

Chrome 88: Digital Goods, Lighting Estimation in Augmented Reality, and More

Thursday, December 3, 2020

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.Digital Goods APIChrome now supports an API for 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.Origin TrialsThis 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 Guide for Web Developers.New Origin TrialsWebXR: AR Lighting EstimationAllows 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.Completed Origin TrialsThe following features, previously in Chrome origin trials, are now enabled by default.performance.measureMemory() MethodAdds 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 Monitor your web page's total memory usage with measureMemory().PointerLock unadjustedMovementAdds the ability to request unadjusted/unaccelerated mouse movement data when in 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 releaseAnchor target=_blank implies rel=noopener by DefaultTo mitigate "tab-napping" attacks, in which a new tab/window opened by a victim context may navigate that opener context, anchors that target _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 ScrollbarsDark 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.AbortSignal in addEventListener()Adds the 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 PropertyAllows 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 <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()Allows complex selectors inside the :not() pseudo class, such as :not(.a + .b .c).Don't Clear adoptedStyleSheets on Adoption to/from <template>When adopting a shadow root into a <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 AttributeA new attribute on 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.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.

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()The type parameter in WakeLock.request() Stay awake with the Screen Wake Lock API.Origin IsolationOrigin isolation allows developers to opt in to giving up certain cross-origin same-site access capabilities—namely synchronous scripting via 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 PropertyAdds support for 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 HeaderThe 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()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 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. JavaScriptThis version of Chrome incorporates version 8.8 of the V8 JavaScript engine. It specifically includes the change listed below. You can find a complete Making your website "cross-origin isolated" using COOP and COEP.Deprecations, and RemovalsThis version of Chrome introduces the deprecations and removals listed below. Visit ChromeStatus.com for lists of previous removals.Don't Allow Popups During Page Unload (Enterprises)Since Chrome 80, pages have no longer been able to open a new page during unloading using window.open(). Since then enterprises have been able to use the AllowPopupsDuringPageUnload policy flag to allow popups during page unload. Starting in Chrome 88, this flag is no longer supported.FTP Support RemovedChrome is removing support for FTP URLs. The legacy FTP implementation in Chrome has no support for encrypted connections (FTPS), nor proxies. Usage of FTP in the browser is sufficiently low that it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client. In addition, more capable FTP clients are available on all affected platforms.Google Chrome 72 and later removed support for fetching document subresources over FTP and rendering of top level FTP resources. Navigating to FTP URLs results in showing a directory listing or a download depending on the type of resource. A bug in Google Chrome 74 and later resulted in dropping support for accessing FTP URLs over HTTP proxies. Proxy support for FTP was removed entirely in Google Chrome 76.The remaining capabilities of Google Chrome's FTP implementation were restricted to either displaying a directory listing or downloading a resource over unencrypted connections. In Chrome 77, FTP support was disabled by default for fifty percent of users but was available with flags.In Chrome 88 all FTP support is disabled.Web Components v0 RemovedWeb Components v0 have been in a reverse origin trial since Chrome 80. This allowed users of the API time to upgrade their sites while ensuring that new adopters of Web Components used version 1. The reverse origin trial ends with Chrome 87, making Chrome 88 the first in which version 0 is no longer supported. The Web Components v1 APIs replace Web Components v0 and are fully supported in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. This removal covers the items listed below.

Custom Elements v0

HTML Imports

Shadow DOM v0

Transparent privacy practices for Chrome Extensions

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Updating our user data privacy policy

We are also introducing an

You can find the full policy in the User Data FAQ .

Thank you for working with us to build a better web with transparency, choice, and control for everyone.

Posted by Alexandre Blondin and Mark M. Jaycox, Chrome Product & Policy

Tab throttling and more performance improvements in Chrome M87

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Even if you have a lot of tabs open, you likely only focus on a small set of them to get a task done. Starting in this release, Chrome is actively managing your computer’s resources to make the tabs you care about fast—while allowing you to keep hundreds of tabs open—so you can pick up where you left off.
In this release, we’re improving how Chrome understands and manages resources with Tab throttling, occlusion tracking and back/forward caching, so you can quickly get to what you need when you need it.

Tab throttling and Occlusion Tracking

Knowing what tabs you’re using helps Chrome manage your computer’s resources more efficiently to get things done. We’ve made significant improvements by preventing background tabs from waking up your CPU too often, and no longer rendering tabs that you can’t see.

We investigated how background tabs use system resources and found that JavaScript Timers represent >40% of the work in background tabs. Reducing their impact on CPU and power is important to make the browser more efficient. Beginning in M87, we’re

Back/forward cache is one of our long wished-for feature requests in Chrome and now with Chrome 87 we will gradually launch it to Chrome for Android users. Head over to this technical article to learn more about how we added back/forward cache within Chrome's multi-process architecture and if you're a web developer, learn how to make the most of the back/forward cache on your website.

Posted by Mark Chang, Chrome Product Manager

Data source: Real world data anonymously aggregated from Chrome pre-stable channels.

Reducing abusive notification content

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Although notifications on the web are useful for a variety of applications, they can also be misused for phishing, malware or fake messages that imitate system notifications for the purpose of generating user interactions.

In Chrome 86, we’ve expanded on previous efforts [

Mobile UI for quiet notifications on abusive websites. The new UI discourages users from allowing notifications from these websites.

This UI exactly matches the UI that was previously announced for Chrome 84. The only difference is in Chrome 86 we will begin blocking notification permission requests when sites have a pattern of sending abusive notification content.

Why are we doing this?

Abusive notification prompts are one of the top user complaints we receive about Chrome. Our goal with these changes is to improve the experience for Chrome users and to reduce the incentive for abusive sites to misuse the web notifications feature.

How will Chrome detect sites sending abusive notification content?

Google’s automated web crawling service will occasionally subscribe to website push notifications if the push permission is requested. Notifications that are sent to the automated Chrome instances, using Safe Browsing technology, will be evaluated for abusive content, and sites sending abusive notifications will be flagged for enforcement if the issue is unresolved.

What happens if abusive notifications are detected from my website?

When a site is found to be in “Failing” status for any type of notification abuse, Search Console will send an email to registered site owners and users in the site's Search Console at least 30 calendar days prior to the start of enforcement. During the 30 day grace period websites can address the issue and request another review.

We recommend concerned site owners and developers review the guide for how to fix abusive notifications and request another review of your website.

Are any further abusive notification protections planned?

Prior to the release of Chrome’s abusive notifications protections, many users have already unintentionally allowed notifications from websites engaging in abusive activity. In an upcoming release, Chrome will revert the notification permission status from “granted” to “default” for abusive origins, preventing further notifications unless the user returns to the abusive origin and re-enables notifications.

We’ll be listening for feedback from users and developers about the effectiveness of current enforcements and may make further changes based on that feedback.

Posted by PJ McLachlan, Product Manager

Chrome 87 Beta: WebAuthn in DevTools, Pan/Tilt/Zoom, Flow Relative Shorthands and More

Thursday, October 15, 2020

Control camera pan, tilt, and zoomRoom-scale video conferencing solutions deploy cameras with pan, tilt, and zoom capabilities so that software can point the camera at meeting participants. Starting in Chrome 87, the pan, tilt, and zoom features on cameras are accessible to websites using media track constraints in MediaDevices.getUserMedia() and MediaStreamTrack.applyConstraints().Websites are only allowed to control these capabilities when users explicitly grant permission. For details on using the new capabilities and a demo, see Control camera pan, tilt, and zoom. CSS flow-relative shorthand and offset propertiesThe trend in CSS for many years has been to supplement physical properties with logical properties. Properties that assume language flows left to right and top to bottom don't work in non-European text such as vertical Chinese text, or Arabic. Modern CSS rules use flow-relative terms like start and end and provide rules for dealing with the text's axis (direction). The first step in implementing this in Chrome was to implement the most granular flow-relative features of the CSS Logical Properties and Values spec. Chrome 87 ships shorthands and
offsets to make these logical properties and values a bit easier to write. What was once written with multiple CSS rules can now be written as one. For example, separate rules for margin-block-start and margin-block-end may now be written using a single margin-block property. For a list of all flow-relative shorthands now supported by Chrome, and explanations for how to use them, see Logical layout enhancements with flow-relative shorthands. For more CSS-related updates, see the CSS section, below.Completed Origin TrialsOrigin trials allow you to try new features and give feedback on usability, practicality, and effectiveness to the web standards community. The following feature, previously in a Chrome origin trial, is now enabled by default.Cookie Store APIThe Cookie Store API exposes HTTP cookies to service workers and offers an asynchronous alternative to document.cookie.Other features in this releasecross-origin isolationChrome 87 has a number of changes related to cross-origin isolation. Chrome will now use origin instead of site as agent cluster key for cross-origin isolated agent clusters. Mutation of document.domain is no longer supported for cross-origin isolated agent clusters. This change also introduces window.crossOriginIsolated, a boolean that indicates whether APIs that require cross-origin isolation are allowed to use it. Supporting APIs include:

SharedArrayBuffer (required for WebAssembly Threads)

performance.measureMemory()

JS Self-Profiling API

For more information, see Making your website "cross-origin isolated" using COOP and COEP.iframe attribute for limiting same-origin iframe document accessAdds the disallowdocumentaccess property to disallow cross-document scripting between iframes from the same origin in the same parent document. This also puts same-origin iframes in separate event loops.Note: This item was pulled from Chrome 87 beta and was not in later builds.isInputPending()Sometimes long-running scripts block user input. A lag between a user's action and a response by an app is a bad user experience. To address this, Chrome has added a method called isInputPending(), accessible from navigator.scheduling, which can be called from long-running operations. You can find an example of the method's use in the draft spec.Range Request Headers in Service WorkersHTTP range requests, which have been available in major browsers for several years, allow servers to send requested data to the client in chunks. This has proved especially useful for large media files where the user experience is improved through smoother playback and improved pause and resume functions.Historically, range requests and services workers did not work well together, forcing developers to build work-arounds. Starting in Chrome 87, passing range requests through to the network from inside a service worker will "just work."For an explanation of the issues with range requests and what's changed in Chrome 87, see Handling range requests in a service worker.Streams API: transferable streamsTransferable streams now allows ReadableStream, WritableStream, and TransformStream objects to be passed as arguments to postMessage(). The streams APIs provide ubiquitous, interoperable primitives for creating, composing, and consuming streams of data. A natural thing to do with a stream is to pass it to a web worker. This provides a fluent primitive for offloading work to another thread. Offloading work onto a worker is important for a smooth user experience, but the ergonomics can be awkward. Transferable streams solve this problem for streams. Once the stream itself has been transferred, the data is transparently cloned in the background.Transition related event handlersThe ontransitionrun, ontransitionstart, and ontransitioncancel event handler attributes allow developers to add event listeners for 'transitionrun', 'transitionstart', and 'transitioncancel' events on elements, Document objects, and Window objects.WakeLockSentinel.released AttributeThe

a new property called released that indicates whether a sentinel has already been released. It defaults to false and changes to true when a release event is dispatched. The new attribute helps web developers know when locks are released so that they do not need to keep track of them manually.

CSS

@font-face descriptors to override font metrics

New @font-face descriptors have been added to ascent-override, descent-override, and line-gap-override to override metrics of the font. This Improves interoperably across browsers and operating systems, so that the same font always looks the same on the same site, regardless of OS or browser. Additionally, it aligns metrics between two web fonts present simultaneously, but for different glyphs. Finally, it overrides font metrics for a fallback font to emulate a web font, to minimize cumulative layout shift.

Text Decoration and Underline Properties

Chrome now supports text-decoration-skip-ink property. The new properties are text-decoration-thickness, text-underline-offset and a from-font keyword for text-underline-position.The quotes Property Supports the 'auto' ValueCSS2 allowed browsers to define the default value for the quotes property, which Chrome formerly followed. Chrome 87 now follows CSS Generated Content Module Level 3 in which the 'auto' keyword is the default value. That spec requires that a typographically appropriate value be used for quotes based on the content language of the element and/or its parent.JavaScriptThis version of Chrome incorporates version 8.7 of the V8 JavaScript engine. It specifically includes the changes listed below. You can find a complete list of recent features in the V8 release notes.Atomics.waitAsync()Chrome now supports Atomics.waitAsync(), the async version of Atomics.wait(). Atomics.waitAsync() allows programmers to wait on a SharedArrayBuffer location in the same fashion as Atomics.wait() but returns a Promise instead.Atomics.wait() blocks the thread and cannot be used on the main web browser thread, where blocking is disallowed. This makes coordination via SharedArrayBuffers between the main thread and worker threads more ergonomic.Deprecations and RemovalsThis version of Chrome introduces the deprecations and removals listed below. Visit ChromeStatus.com for lists of previous removals.Comma separator in iframe allow attributePermissions policy declarations in an <iframe> tag can no longer use commas as a separator between items. Developers should use semicolons instead.-webkit-font-size-deltaBlink will no longer support the rarely-used -webkit-font-size-delta property. Developers should use font-size to control font size instead.Deprecate FTP supportChrome is deprecating and removing support for FTP URLs. The current FTP implementation in Google Chrome has no support for encrypted connections (FTPS), nor proxies. Usage of FTP in the browser is sufficiently low that it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client. In addition, more capable FTP clients are available on all affected platforms.

Google Chrome 72 and later removed support for fetching document subresources over FTP and rendering of top level FTP resources. Currently navigating to FTP URLs results in showing a directory listing or a download depending on the type of resource. A bug in Google Chrome 74 and later resulted in dropping support for accessing FTP URLs over HTTP proxies. Proxy support for FTP was removed entirely in Google Chrome 76. In Chrome 86, FTP was turned off for pre-release channels (Canary and Beta) and was experimentally turned off for one percent of stable users.

The remaining capabilities of Google Chrome's FTP implementation are restricted to either displaying a directory listing or downloading a resource over unencrypted connections. Remainder of the deprecation follows this timeline:Chrome 87FTP support will be disabled by default for fifty percent of users but can be enabled using the flags listed above.Chrome 88FTP support will be disabled.

Chromium Blog

Chrome Dev Summit 2020: Building an open web for our users and developers

Manifest V3 now available on M88 Beta

Easy to build, monetize, and discover: List your web app on Google Play

Seamless payments and password management in Chrome

Continuing our journey to bring instant experiences to the whole web

Chrome 88: Digital Goods, Lighting Estimation in Augmented Reality, and More

Transparent privacy practices for Chrome Extensions

Tab throttling and more performance improvements in Chrome M87

Reducing abusive notification content

Chrome 87 Beta: WebAuthn in DevTools, Pan/Tilt/Zoom, Flow Relative Shorthands and More

Labels

Archive

Feed