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Chrome 88 is starting to roll out to stable now.

Here's what you need to know:

  • You can now upload extensions using manifest v3 to the Chrome Web Store.
  • The aspect-ratio CSS property makes it easy to set the aspect ratio on any element.
  • Chrome 88 will heavily throttle chained JavaScript timers for hidden pages in particular conditions.
  • You can now use Play Billing in your Trusted Web Activity.
  • All the videos from Chrome Dev Summit are up.
  • And, there's plenty more.

I'm Pete LePage, working, and shooting from home, let's dive in and see what's new for developers in Chrome 88!

Manifest v3 #

Chrome 88 now supports extensions built with manifest v3, and you can upload them to the Chrome Web Store. Manifest v3 is a new extension platform, that makes Chrome extensions more secure, performant, and privacy respecting, by default.

For example, it disallows remotely hosted code, which helps Chrome Web Store reviewers better understand what risks an extension poses. And should allow you to update your extensions faster.

Ddj 200 wedj. It introduces service workers as a replacement for background pages. Since service workers are only resident in memory when needed, extensions will use less system resources.

And to give users greater visibility and control over how extensions use and share their data, in a future release we will be adopting a new install flow that allows users to withhold sensitive permissions at install time.

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Check out developer.chrome.com for complete details, and how to migrate your current extension to manifest v3.


CSS aspect-ratio property #

Normally, only some elements have an aspect ratio, for example images. For them, if only the width, or the height, is specified, the other is automatically computed using the intrinsic aspect ratio.

Video ambush. In Chrome 88, the aspect-ratio property allows you to explicitly specify an aspect ratio, enabling a similar behavior.

You can also use progressive enhancement to check if it's supported in the browser, and apply a fallback if necessary. Then, with the new CSS 4 not selector, you can make your code a little cleaner!

Thanks to Jen Simmons for calling out this is supported in the latest Safari Technical Preview, so we should see it in Safari soon! And check out Una's demo to see it in action.

Heavy throttling of chained JS timers #

Chrome 88 will heavily throttle chained JavaScript timers for hidden pages in particular conditions. This will reduce CPU usage, which will also reduce battery usage. There are some edge cases where this will change behavior, but timers are often used where a different API would be more efficient, and more reliable.

That was pretty jargon heavy, and a bit ambiguous, so check out Jake's article Heavy throttling of chained JS timers beginning in Chrome 88 for all the details.

Play billing in Trusted Web Activity #

You can now use Play Billing in your Trusted Web Activity to sell digital goods and subscriptions using the new Digital Goods API. It's available as an origin trial in Chrome 88 on Android, and we expect it to expand the origin trial to Chrome OS in the next release.

Once your accounts are set-up, update your Trusted Web Activity to enable Play billing, and create your digital goods in the Play Developer Console. Then, in your PWA, add your origin trial token, and you're ready to add the code to check for existing purchases, query for available purchases, and make new purchases.

Adriana and Andre go into more detail in their Chrome Dev Summit talk - What's new for web apps in Play, or check out the docs.

And more #

And of course there's plenty more.

  • To conform to a change in the HTML standard, anchor tags with target='_blank' will now imply rel='noopener' by default, this helps prevent tab-napping attacks.
  • Most operating systems enable mouse acceleration by default, but that can be a problem for some games. In Chrome 88, the Pointer Lock API allows you to disable mouse acceleration. That means the same physical motion, slow or fast, results in the same rotation, providing a better gaming experience and higher accuracy.
  • And addEventListener now takes an Abort Signal as an option. Calling abort() removes that event listener, making it easy to shut down event listeners when no longer needed.

Further reading #

This covers only some of the key highlights. Check the links below for additional changes in Chrome 88.

Subscribe #

Want to stay up to date with our videos, then subscribe to our Chrome Developers YouTube channel, and you'll get an email notification whenever we launch a new video.

I'm Pete LePage, and as soon as Chrome 89 is released, I'll be right here to tell you -- what's new in Chrome!

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Chrome 90 is starting to roll out to stable now, and in honor of Chrome 90, the video is '90s style. Enjoy!

Here's what you need to know: Download nisca coporation driver.

  • There's a new value for the CSS overflow property.
  • The Feature Policy API has been renamed to Permissions Policy.
  • And there's a new way to implement and use Shadow DOM directly in HTML.
  • I owned several jackets almost exactly like this in the 1990s.
  • And, there's plenty more.

I'm Pete LePage, and I've got the 411 for developers in Chrome 90, doin' it 1990's style!

Prevent overflow with overflow: clip#

CSS IS AWESOME

CSS is all that and a bag of chips! But, I think every web developer has seen and experienced something that overflows awkwardly at some point. There's a great post on CSS Tricks about different ways to handle the overflow, for example, using overflow: hidden, or auto.

In the CSS Overflow Spec, there's a new clip property that works similarly to hidden.

Using overflow: clip makes it possible for you to prevent any type of scrolling for the box, including programmatic scrolling. That means the box is not considered a scroll container; it does not start a new formatting context, which gives it better performance than overflow: hidden. And if you need it, you can apply clipping to a single axis via overflow-x and overflow-y.

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Oh, and FYI - there's also overflow-clip-margin, which allows you to expand the clip border. This is useful for cases where there is ink overflow that should be visible.

See overflow: clip in action at https://petele-css-is-awesome.glitch.me/

Feature Policy is now Permissions Policy #

Back in Chrome 74, we introduced the Feature Policy API, which allows you to selectively enable, disable, and modify the behavior of certain APIs and web features in the browser. These policies are a contract between you and the browser. They inform the browser about what your intent is.

If your code, or any of the third party libraries you use violate your preselected rules, the browser overrides the behavior with better UX or just says, 'talk to the hand,' blocking the API altogether.

Starting in Chrome 90, the Feature Policy API will be renamed Permissions Policy, and the HTTP header has been renamed along with it. At the same time, the community has settled on a new syntax, based on Structured Field Values for HTTP.

Chrome 89 and earlier #

If you're interested in how to use this on your site, check out Introduction to Feature Policy.

Declarative Shadow DOM #

Shadow DOM, part of the Web Components standard, provides a way to scope CSS styles to a specific DOM subtree and isolate that subtree from the rest of the document. Until now, the only way to use Shadow DOM was to construct a shadow root using JavaScript.

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This works fine for client-side rendering, but not so well in server side rendering where there is no built in way to express Shadow Roots in the server generated HTML. But, starting in Chrome 90, with the Declarative Shadow DOM, you're good to go. You can create shadow roots using only HTML.

A Declarative Shadow Root is a <template> element with a shadowroot attribute. It's detected by the HTML parser and immediately applied as the shadow root of its parent element.

Loading the pure HTML markup results in this DOM tree:

This gives us the benefits of Shadow DOM's encapsulation and slot projection in static HTML. No JavaScript is needed to produce the entire tree, including the Shadow Root.

Check out Declarative Shadow DOM on web.dev for more details.

And more #

And of course there's plenty more.

To help improve privacy, and even loading speeds for users visiting sites that support HTTPS, Chrome's address bar will use https:// by default. And if you haven't set up an automatic redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, now would be a great time to do that.

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And an AV1 encoder is shipping in Chrome desktop that is specifically optimized for video conferencing with WebRTC integration.

Further reading #

This covers only some of the key highlights. Check the links below for additional changes in Chrome 90.

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Subscribe #

Want to stay up to date with our videos, then subscribe to our Chrome Developers YouTube channel, and you'll get an email notification whenever we launch a new video.

I'm Pete LePage, and as soon as Chrome 91 is released, I'll be right here to tell you what's new in Chrome!

A special shout out #

I had a lot of fun shooting this 1990s themed episode of New in Chrome. Huge thanks to Sean Meehan for the idea and for bringing together the amazing folks who helped open the time warp to 1990.

GDS Design

  • Fola Akinola
  • Derek Bass
  • Christopher Bodel
  • Nick Krusick
  • Chris Walker

And of course, Loren Borja, Lee Carruthers, and Lukas Holcek who work on all of my New in Chrome videos and make me look way better than I actually am. THANK YOU!

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