Chrome 84 Release Highlights: App Icon Shortcuts, Web Animations API, Wake Lock, Content Indexing, Idle Detection, and WebAssembly SIMD
Chrome 84 was officially released with a focus on developer‑oriented updates, introducing App Icon Shortcuts, expanded Web Animations API support, Wake Lock and Content Indexing APIs, experimental Idle Detection and WebAssembly SIMD features, as well as continued SameSite cookie policy refinements.
Chrome 84 has been officially released, offering relatively few user‑facing changes but a substantial set of updates for developers, including new Web APIs and enhancements to existing ones.
App Icon Shortcuts – allows users to launch common tasks directly from an app’s icon.
Web Animations API – adds support for many previously unavailable features.
Wake Lock – prevents the screen from dimming or locking.
Content Indexing API – helps display offline‑available content.
New experimental features: Idle Detection and WebAssembly SIMD.
Same‑Site Cookie policy – updates resume.
Other additions.
App Icon Shortcuts
App Icon Shortcuts enable users to quickly start common tasks within an application. The feature is supported in desktop and mobile versions of Chrome and Edge; on Windows and macOS it is accessed via right‑click on the app icon, and on Android by long‑pressing the icon.
Web Animations API
Chrome 84 adds many previously unsupported capabilities to the Web Animations API.
animation.ready and animation.finished are now implemented.
The browser can now clean up and delete old animations, saving memory and improving performance.
Composite modes can be combined using the add and accumulate options.
Content Indexing API
The Content Indexing API lets developers add URLs and metadata for content that can be used offline, allowing the browser to surface that content to users even when there is no network connection.
Wake Lock API
Using this API, a website can enable a wake lock to prevent the screen from dimming or the device from locking.
Origin Trials
Two experimental features are available:
Idle Detection – notifies when a user is idle, which is useful for chat or social applications to indicate a contact’s availability.
WebAssembly SIMD – introduces operations that map to common SIMD instructions in hardware, improving performance especially for multimedia workloads.
Other Updates
Gradual restoration of SameSite cookie changes.
Websites that abuse permission requests or notifications will be automatically hidden from the notification UI.
QuicTransport – a new experimental feature.
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