Adjusted timeline for SharedArrayBuffers
May 10th, 2021
Back in February, we announced that cross-origin isolation will be required on all platforms in order to access APIs like SharedArrayBuffer and performance.measureUserAgentSpecificMemory() starting in Chrome 91. Based on your feedback and issues reported, we’ve decided to adjust the timeline for SharedArrayBuffer usage in none cross-origin isolated sites to be restricted in Chrome 92. Your…
Progress Delayed Is Progress Denied
May 5th, 2021
The bombshell article of the week is from Alex Russell of Google/Chrome. Alex has long been super critical of Apple, particularly about how there is literally no option to run any other browser than Safari on iOS. This article isn’t just fist-waving about that, but a dissertation accusing Apple of real harm to the web…
Chrome 91: Handwriting Recognition, WebXR Plane Detection and More
April 22nd, 2021
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…
Efficient And Safe Allocations Everywhere!
April 12th, 2021
In our constant work to improve performance, our engineers sometimes have to seek optimizations in places that most software developers don’t venture. In this post in our series, The Fast and The Curious, a team of senior engineers showed how they approached replacing the system-level memory allocator with an optimized version, yielding significant memory savings…
Don’t Copy That Surface
April 5th, 2021
This post is part of a new series we’re bringing you of deeper dives into the careful trade-offs and complex engineering that goes into making Chrome fast and reliable. This debugging adventure by Chrome developer and blogger Bruce Dawson reduced CPU usage by about 3% when using a webcam – a real help for those…
A safer default for navigation: HTTPS
March 23rd, 2021
Starting in version 90, Chrome’s address bar will use https:// by default, improving privacy and even loading speed for users visiting websites that support HTTPS. Chrome users who navigate to websites by manually typing a URL often don’t include “http://” or “https://”. For example, users often type “example.com” instead of “https://example.com” in the address bar….
Chrome can now caption audio and video
March 18th, 2021
Captions make online content more accessible. If you’re in a noisy environment, trying to keep the volume down, or are part of the 466 million people in the world who are deaf or hard of hearing, having captions lets you follow along to whatever content you are watching — whether it’s viral feta pasta videos,…
Mitigating Side-Channel Attacks
March 12th, 2021
The web platform relies on the origin as a fundamental security boundary, and browsers do a pretty good job at preventing explicit leakage of data from one origin to another. Attacks like Spectre, however, show that we still have work to do to mitigate implicit data leakage. The side-channels exploited through these attacks prove that…
Chrome 90 Beta: AV1 Encoder for WebRTC, New Origin Trials, and More
March 11th, 2021
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 90 is beta as of March 11, 2021. AV1 Encoder An AV1 encoder is shipping…
Advanced memory management and more performance improvements in M89
March 11th, 2021
Boosting performance while adding features, functionality, and improving security, requires deep and continuous investment. Today’s post is the first in a series this year that will go into more technical detail about Chrome’s ongoing efforts around performance. In this release, we’ve dug deep into the core of Chrome, upgrading how we allocate and discard memory,…