Published: August 20, 2026
Unless otherwise noted, the following changes apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, ChromeOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about these features by using the provided links or by visiting ChromeStatus.com. Chrome is in beta as of this release. You can download the latest beta version from Google.com for desktop or from Google Play Store on Android.
CSS and UI
Single-axis scroll containers
Extends the overflow property to support scrollable values together with clip (for example, overflow: scroll clip). This allows position: sticky to be constrained by different ancestor scroll containers per axis, and gives authors a way to ensure an axis using overflow: clip stays in place.
The scroll-axis-lock property
scroll-axis-lock is a CSS property that developers can use to instruct browsers not to constrain a user's scrolling gesture to one axis.
Web browsers often "lock" a user's scrolling gesture to a single axis when that gesture starts with significantly more movement in one axis than in the perpendicular axis. In many cases, this behavior improves the user's experience by avoiding accidental scrolls along the perpendicular axis when the user's intent was to scroll only one axis. However, in cases where a developer wishes their element to always be diagonally scrollable, this locking behavior forces the user to start their gesture at an angle that doesn't trigger the locking, often not in alignment with the author's intended user experience.
JavaScript
Iterator Join
A TC39 proposal to add to JavaScript a means to concatenate the contents of an iterator into a string. The join() method of Iterator instances is similar to Array.prototype.join(): it returns a string that is the concatenation of all elements produced by the iterator, separated by commas or a specified separator string.
Joint Iteration
A TC39 proposal to synchronise the advancement of multiple iterators, often called zip.
Web APIs
Capability elements: <camera> and <microphone>
The <camera> and <microphone> capability elements are declarative, user-activated HTML controls that share the same underlying mechanism as the <usermedia> MVP element, with one key distinction: they are designed to request a single capability. The <camera> element specifically requests video capture, while the <microphone> element specifically requests audio capture. Like the <usermedia> MVP, they embed a browser-controlled, strictly styled UI into the page, ensuring a strong, intentional user signal (a click) before a permission prompt is triggered or a stream is started.
The <camera> and <microphone> elements provide a dedicated, semantic HTML control for these single-capability use cases. They maintain the identical security model, strict styling constraints, and built-in permission recovery path as the <usermedia> MVP, but offer a more tailored and ergonomic API for developers who don't need mixed media access.
Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) decoding support
Adds support for decoding and playing back the Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) container within HTML media elements with Media Source Extensions (MSE). IAMF is an open, royalty-free spatial audio format that supports channel-based, scene-based, and object-based audio presentations. Supporting this format allows web developers to deliver consistent, immersive 3D audio experiences across different devices without relying on proprietary formats or managing complex discrete audio channel routing in JavaScript.
Interoperable dispatch timing for transitionrun and media query events
Aligns Blink's dispatch timing for animation transitionrun events and media query change events with the HTML specification, making the timing interoperable with Gecko and WebKit. More precisely, as per the HTML window event loop specification, transitionrun events will be fired at Step 3.11 even for animations created earlier in the same iteration (instead of delaying them for a later iteration), and the media query change event will be fired at Step 3.10 before firing any pending animation events (instead of intermixing them with animation events at Step 3.11).
WebAudio: Configurable render quantum
Adds an optional renderSizeHint to AudioContext and OfflineAudioContext. This allows developers to customize the WebAudio render quantum size by passing a specific integer, use the default of 128 frames by omitting the hint or passing "default", or request that the browser select an optimal size by specifying "hardware".
WebGPU: buffer_view feature
A WGSL language feature for reinterpreting data in variables. The feature allows developers to divide a single uniform, storage, or workgroup variable into multiple logical variables. It also allows the type of the data in the variable to be interpreted as multiple types within the program.
XML parsing in Rust for non-XSLT scenarios
To improve browser security and protect users against memory-related vulnerabilities, Chrome 153 is changing its XML parsing engine to a memory-safe Rust implementation for several common scenarios. This foundational update eliminates potential memory corruption bugs while maintaining full compatibility with existing web specifications.
Chrome has already begun to deprecate and remove XSLT. While this process continues, the new, safer parser will handle the following scenarios where no XSLT is required:
DOMParserWeb API.- Accessing
responseXMLofXMLHttpRequest. - SVG standalone images (that is, accessing an
image.svgdocument directly as a top-level navigation). - SVG external images (including a main document embedding an SVG as an external image resource).
New origin trials
In Chrome 153, you can opt into the following new origin trials.
JavaScript Self-Profiling Markers
The JavaScript Self-Profiling API lets a web application sample its own call stacks to measure performance on real user devices. This feature adds an optional marker field to each captured sample that identifies the type of browser activity running when the sample was taken: script, gc, style, layout, paint, or other. A trace normally shows gaps between stacks that can't be interpreted; markers let developers attribute that time to browser work happening outside their JavaScript, for example distinguishing script execution from style recalculation, layout, or a garbage collection pause, making slow traces easier to analyze and optimize.
Deprecations and removals
Remove non-standard navigations targeted at _current
Blink currently supports navigations targeted at _current. This feature is removed in Chrome 153 as it is non-standard, with minimal usage across the web.
Remove document.requestStorageAccessFor
The requestStorageAccessFor (rSAFor) API is an extension to the Storage Access API that allows a top-level site to request access to unpartitioned ("first-party") cookies on behalf of embedded sites. It is only usable in Chrome to request storage access between Related Website Sets sites, therefore is removed along with Related Website Sets.
Remove Related Website Sets
Related Website Sets (RWS), formerly known as First Party Sets, provides a framework for developers to declare relationships among sites, to enable limited cross-site cookie access for specific, user-facing purposes. This is facilitated through the use of the Storage Access API (SAA) and requestStorageAccessFor (rSAFor). RWS was designed for use in a browser without third-party cookies. Following Chrome's announcement that the current approach to third-party cookies will be maintained, Related Website Sets is now removed from Chrome.