New in Chrome 128

Adriana Jara

Here's what you need to know:

Displaying <ruby> elements is better with line breaks.
Promise.try makes it easier to chain Promises.
PointerEvent is extended to uniquely identify multiple pens.
And there's plenty more.

I'm Adriana Jara. Let's dive in and see what's new for developers in Chrome 128.

Line breakable `<ruby>`

The <ruby> element enhances text presentation, especially for East Asian languages. It lets you display phonetic annotations or other supplemental information above or beside base text.

A ruby element consists of two main parts, ruby base which is the main text and ruby text which is the annotation text, marked up with the element.

Previously if a ruby-base or a ruby-text was longer than a whole line, they were wrapped individually creating layout challenges.

Now line-breakable ruby, places wrapped ruby annotation text over wrapped base text achieving ideal text rendering.

Visit Line-breakable <ruby> and CSS ruby-align property for examples and more information.

Promise.try

Promise.try makes it easier to handle errors with Promises. There's a pattern where you have a function, f. This function may be async, and return a Promise, or it may not. To use Promise semantics to handle errors in both cases, you wrap the function in a Promise.

One way to achieve this is with Promise.resolve().then(f), but in this case f would be run needlessly asynchronously on the next tick.

To avoid this problem you need to use new Promise(resolve => resolve(f())) which is not ergonomic at all.

Promise.try, is the simple, straightforward way to accomplish the same. It lets you start a Promise chain that catches all errors in .catch handlers instead of having to handle both synchronous and asynchronous exception flows.

To learn more check out the Promise.try documentation.

PointerEvent.deviceProperties for multi-pen inking

Developers didn't have a way to distinguish between two individual pens on an ink-enabled digitizer. The existing PointerEvent.pointerId attribute is implemented in different ways and does not always persist for each ink stroke or interaction with the screen.

The PointerEvent interface is now extended to include a new attribute: deviceProperties. It contains the attribute uniqueId, that represents a session-persistent, document isolated, unique identifier that a developer can reliably use to identify individual pens interacting with the page.

With this change you can, for example, set specific colors or pen shapes for each device interacting with the digitizer.

Read about getting started with pointer events in Pointing the way forward.

And more!

Of course there's plenty more.

The CSS zoom property is now aligned with the latest standard.
AudioContext creation and audio rendering errors are now reported through AudioContext.onerror.
The DevTools Animations panel now captures animations and you can edit @keyframes live.

Read the full release notes.

New in Chrome 128

Line breakable <ruby>

Promise.try

PointerEvent.deviceProperties for multi-pen inking

And more!

Further reading

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Line breakable `<ruby>`