Chrome 136 beta

Rachel Andrew

Published: April 3, 2025

Unless otherwise noted, the following changes apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, ChromeOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 136 is beta as of April 3, 2025. You can download the latest on Google.com for desktop or on Google Play Store on Android.

CSS and UI

This release adds six new CSS and UI features.

CSS dynamic-range-limit property

Enables a page to limit the maximum brightness of HDR content.

Ignore letter spacing in cursive scripts

This feature adds logic to ignore the letter-spacing setting for cursive scripts, even if specified by the developer as per spec, to ensure that letter spacing does not break words.

To eliminate user browsing history leaks, anchor elements are styled as :visited only if they have been clicked from this top-level site and frame origin before.

By only styling links that have been clicked on this site and frame before, the many side-channel attacks that have been developed to obtain :visited links styling information are now obsolete. They no longer provide sites with new information about users.

Learn more about these improvements to the privacy of :visited links.

Rename string attr() type to raw-string

The CSS Working Group resolved to replace string attr() type with raw-string.

Therefore, Chrome has changed attr() syntax, so that attr(data-foo string) will now be attr(data-foo raw-string).

Type-agnostic var() fallback

The fallback part of a var() function does not validate against the type of the custom property being referenced.

Unprefixed print-color-adjust

The print-color-adjust property lets you adjust colors in printed web pages. This is the same as Chrome's already-supported -webkit-print-color-adjust, but with a standardized name. The -webkit prefixed version is not removed.

Web APIs

AudioContext interrupted state

Adds an "interrupted" state to AudioContextState. This new state lets the UA pause playback in these scenarios and enable web applications to respond appropriately.

Blob URL partitioning: Fetching/Navigation

As a continuation of Storage Partitioning, this implements partitioning of Blob URL access by Storage Key (top-level site, frame origin, and the has-cross-site-ancestor boolean), with the exception of top-level navigations which will remain partitioned only by frame origin. This behavior is similar to what's currently implemented by both Firefox and Safari, and aligns Blob URL usage with the partitioning scheme used by other storage APIs as part of Storage Partitioning.

In addition, noopener is now enforced on renderer-initiated top-level navigations to Blob URLs where the corresponding site is cross-site to the top-level site performing the navigation. This aligns Chrome with similar behavior in Safari, and the relevant specs have been updated to reflect these changes.

Call stacks in crash reports from unresponsive web pages

This feature captures the JavaScript call stack when a web page becomes unresponsive due to JavaScript code running an infinite loop or other very long computation. This helps developers identify the cause of the unresponsiveness. The JavaScript call stack is included in the crash reporting API when the reason is unresponsive.

Captured Surface Control API

The Captured Surface Control API lets Web applications forward wheel events to a captured tab, and read and change the zoom level of a captured tab.

CapturedSurfaceResolution

Exposes the pixel ratio of the captured surface while screensharing. This feature will help applications to conserve their system resources or adapt the quality and bandwidth trade-off according to the physical and logical resolutions of the captured surface.

Dispatch click events to captured pointer

If a pointer is captured while the pointerup event is being dispatched, the click event will be dispatched to the captured target instead of the nearest common ancestor of pointerdown and pointerup events as per the UI Event spec. For uncaptured pointers, the click target remains unchanged.

Explicit compile hints with magic comments

Allows the attaching of information about which functions should be eager parsed and compiled in JavaScript files. The information will be encoded as magic comments.

FedCM updates: Multiple IdPs support, removal of "add another account" feature in passive mode

With this update, FedCM can show multiple identity providers in the same dialog. This provides developers with a convenient way to present all supported identity providers to users. We are planning to first tackle the simple case of having all providers in the same get() call. We are also removing support for 'add another account' feature in FedCM passive mode. This feature allows showing a 'use another account' button alongside other IdP accounts in the chooser. The feature is currently unused, and UX conversations have led us to believe that supporting this leads to a more complicated flow without much benefit. This feature will still work in FedCM active mode.

Fluent scrollbars.

This feature modernizes the Chrome scrollbars (both overlay and non-overlay) on Windows and Linux to fit the Windows 11 Fluent design language. Non-overlay Fluent scrollbars will be enabled by default in Linux and Windows. This change applies to Linux as well because Chrome's Linux scrollbar design has historically been aligned with what ships on Windows.

H265 (HEVC) codec support in WebRTC

From Chrome 136, HEVC will join VP8, H.264, VP9, and AV1 as supported codecs in WebRTC. Support will be queryable using the MediaCapabilities API.

This newer codec has increased compression efficiency (higher quality per bitrate) relative to older generation codecs like VP8 and H264 and very strong hardware support going back over a decade. This translates into increased battery life and reduced risk of performance issues, and, depending on the performance of the underlying hardware encoder, will often improve visual experience in cases where hardware VP9 or AV1 encoders are not available.

H26x Codec support updates for MediaRecorder

The MediaRecorder API now supports HEVC encoding, introducing the hvc1.* codec string, and adds new codecs (hev1.* and avc3.*) supporting variable resolution video in MP4. Support for HEVC platform encoding was added in WebCodecs in Chrome 130. As a follow-up, support has been added to the MediaRecorder API in Chromium. The API now supports both MP4 and Matroska muxer types with different HEVC and H.264 mime type specifications. HEVC encoding is only supported if the user's device and operating system provide the necessary capabilities.

IP address logging and reporting in Chrome Enterprise

Chrome Enterprise is enhancing security monitoring and incident response capabilities by collecting and reporting local and remote IP addresses and sending those IP addresses to the Security Investigation Logs (SIT). In addition, Chrome Enterprise will allow admins to optionally send the IP addresses to first-party and third-party SIEM providers using the Chrome Enterprise Reporting connector. This will be available for Chrome Enterprise Core customers.

Incorporate navigation initiator into the HTTP cache partition key

Chrome's HTTP cache keying scheme is updated to include an is-cross-site-main-frame-navigation boolean to mitigate cross-site leak attacks involving top-level navigation. Specifically, this will prevent cross-site attacks in which an attacker can initiate a top-level navigation to a given page and then navigate to a resource known to be loaded by the page in order to infer sensitive information from load timing. This change also improves privacy by preventing a malicious site from using navigations to infer whether a user has visited a given site previously.

Language support for CanvasTextDrawingStyles

The <canvas> DOM element, like all DOM elements, accepts a lang attribute that is used to define language specific treatment for font selection (when fonts have locale specific glyphs). Browsers respect this attribute. However, when an OffscreenCanvas is created there is no way to set locale information, possibly resulting in a state where an offscreen canvas produces rendered results that differ from the canvas in which its output is used. This feature adds a lang IDL attribute to CanvasTextDrawingStyles to give direct control over the language for the text drawing and metrics.

Permissions Policy reports for iframes

Introduces a new violation type called "Potential Permissions Policy violation", which will only look at Permissions Policy (including report-only policy) and the allow attribute set in iframes to detect the conflict between Permissions Policy enforced versus permissions propagated to iframes.

Predictable reported storage quota

Report a predictable storage quota from StorageManager's Estimate API for sites that don't have unlimited storage permissions. It is possible to detect a user's browsing mode using the reported storage quota because the storage space made available is significantly smaller in incognito mode than in regular mode.

Private Aggregation API: Aggregate error reporting

There are a range of error conditions that can be hit when using the Private Aggregation API. For example, the privacy budget could run out, preventing any further histogram contributions. This feature allows developers to register histogram contributions that should only be sent if a particular type of error occurs. This feature supports measuring the frequency of the error conditions and to split these measurements on relevant developer-specified dimensions (for example, version of deployed code). As the errors themselves may be cross-site information, we cannot simply expose them to the page for users without third-party cookies. Instead, this feature reuses the existing aggregate, noised reporting pipelines through the Aggregation Service.

RegExp.escape

RegExp.escape is a static method that takes a string and returns an escaped version that may be used as a pattern inside a regular expression. For example:

const str = prompt("Please enter a string");
const escaped = RegExp.escape(str);
const re = new RegExp(escaped, 'g'); // handles reg exp special tokens with the replacement.

console.log(ourLongText.replace(re));

Speculation rules: tag field

Enables developers to add tag field to speculation rules. This optional field can be used to track the source of speculation rules. For example, to treat them differently at an intermediary server. Any tags associated with a speculation will be sent with the Sec-Speculation-Tags header.

Strict Same Origin Policy for the Storage Access API

Adjusts the Storage Access API semantics to strictly follow the Same Origin Policy. That is, using document.requestStorageAccess() in a frame only attaches cookies to requests to the iframe's origin (not site) by default. Note that the CookiesAllowedForUrls policy or Storage Access Headers may still be used to unblock cross-site cookies.

Update ProgressEvent to use double type for loaded and total

The ProgressEvent has attributes loaded and total indicating the progress, and their type is unsigned long long now. With this feature, the type for these two attributes is changed to double instead, which gives the developer more control over the value. For example, the developers can now create a ProgressEvent with the total of 1 and the loaded increasing from 0 to 1 gradually. This is aligned with the default behavior of the <progress> HTML element if the max attribute is omitted.

Use DOMPointInit for getCharNumAtPosition, isPointInFill, isPointInStroke

This change brings Chromium code in line with the latest W3C spec for SVGGeometryElement and SVGPathElement in terms of usage of DOMPointInit over SVGPoint for getCharNumAtPosition, isPointInFill, isPointInStroke.

Web Authentication conditional create (Passkey upgrades)

WebAuthn conditional create requests let websites upgrade existing password credentials to a passkey.

WebGPU: GPUAdapterInfo isFallbackAdapter attribute

The GPUAdapterInfo isFallbackAdapter boolean attribute indicates if an adapter has significant performance limitations in return for wider compatibility, more predictable behavior, or improved privacy. Note that a fallback adapter may not be present on all systems.

New origin trials

In Chrome 136, you can opt into the following new origin trials.

Audio Output Devices API: setDefaultSinkId()

This feature adds setDefaultSinkId() to MediaDevices, which enables the top-level frame to change the default audio output device used by its subframes.

Let web applications understand bimodal performance timings

Web applications may suffer from bimodal distribution in page load performance, due to factors outside of the web application's control. For example:

  • When a user agent first launches (a "cold start" scenario), it must perform many expensive initialization tasks that compete for resources on the system.
  • Browser extensions can affect the performance of a website. For example, some extensions run additional code on every page you visit, which can increase CPU usage and result in slower response times.
  • When a machine is busy performing intensive tasks, it can lead to slower loading of web pages.

In these scenarios, content the web app attempts to load will be in competition with other work happening on the system. This makes it difficult to detect if performance issues exist within web applications themselves, or because of external factors.

A new confidence field on the PerformanceNavigationTiming object will enable developers to discern if the navigation timings are representative for their web application.

Device Bound Session Credentials

A way for websites to securely bind a session to a single device.

It lets servers have a session that's securely bound to a device. The browser will renew the session periodically as requested by the server, with proof of possession of a private key.

Update of canvas text rendering implementation

The internals of CanvasRenderingContext2D and OffscreenCanvasRenderingContext2D's measureText(), fillText(), and strokeText() have been replaced by a new implementation that better supports RTL text and caching. This might affect performance and BIDI-text output, so this origin trial allows for text-heavy canvas applications to try out the new implementation and report any issues they may encounter.

Deprecations and removals

This version of Chrome introduces the following deprecations and removals. Visit ChromeStatus.com for lists of planned deprecations, current deprecations and previous removals.

This release of Chrome deprecates two features.

Deprecate getters of Intl Locale Info

Intl Locale Info API is a Stage 3 ECMAScript TC39 proposal to enhance the Intl.Locale object by exposing Locale information, such as week data (first day in a week, weekend start day, weekend end day, minimum day in the first week), and text direction hour cycle used in the locale. This change removes some getters deprecated in a specification change since they shipped.

Remove HTMLFencedFrameElement.canLoadOpaqueURL().

canLoadOpaqueURL() was replaced with navigator.canLoadAdAuctionFencedFrame() in 2023, and calling it has resulted in a deprecation console warning ever since pointing developers to the new API. It does not make sense to have the function attached to HTMLFencedFrameElement and instead should be attached to the navigator object (which contains other fenced frame and ad auction methods).