What’s New in Chrome 104 Beta? Key Front‑End Features Unveiled

After Chrome 103 was released earlier this week, Google promoted Chrome 104 to beta on Thursday. The biggest change is the addition of region capture support as part of self‑capture video tracks typically used for video‑conference scenarios. New origin trials have also started, such as shared element transitions and an optional opt‑out for storing credit‑card details via the Secure Payment Confirmation API. Speculative parsing rules have been updated, a multi‑screen window‑placement UI has been added, and various new APIs are available.

The next focus is the :focus-visible CSS pseudo‑class, which lets developers make keyboard navigation more intuitive without JavaScript, for example by setting tabindex="-1 to make an element unfocusable via the keyboard. This effort is driven by Microsoft to support custom components in its Fluent UI design system, which is why the initial experiment appeared in Edge rather than Chrome.

Developers can now opt out of storing credit‑card details in the Secure Payment Confirmation API.

Chrome 104 Beta also introduces WebGL canvas color management, allowing WebGL to set the color space when drawing buffers and importing textures.

Several deprecated features have been removed in Chrome 104, including the U2F authentication token API and a non‑standard client hint mode; iframes can no longer navigate to file‑system URLs.

For more details on the Chrome 104 beta, see the Chromium blog and ChromeStatus.com: https://blog.chromium.org/2022/06/chrome-104-beta-new-media-query-syntax.html

The Chrome 104 stable version is scheduled for release on August 2.