Chrome 98 Beta Released: Color Gradient Vector Fonts Experimental Region Capture…

Chrome 98 Beta Released: Color Gradient Vector Fonts Experimental Region Capture…

Chrome 98 Beta Released: Color Gradient Vector Fonts Experimental Region Capture…

On January 10, 2022, Chrome 98 will go to Beta, which will bring some interesting features, such as the color gradient vector font COLRv1, and the Origin version of the experimental video area capture function.

COLRv1 color gradient vector font

In this release, Chrome supports COLRv1 color gradient vector fonts as an additional new font format. COLRv1 is a color font that contains glyphs with multiple colors, which can be used in scenarios such as emoji or national flags or multicolor letters.

COLRv1 is an evolution of the COLRv0 font format, designed to make color fonts widely available on the web.

COLRv1 fonts bring expressive visual features such as gradients, transitions and compositions at very small font sizes. COLRv1 fonts also support OpenType variants.

In terms of performance, internal shape reuse and compact font format definitions, combined with efficient compression, result in very small font sizes for COLRv1.

The figure shows an example of Noto Color Emoji, which is about 9MB as a bitmap font, but only 1.85MB as a COLRv1 vector font (after WOFF2 compression).

Bitmap font (right), Crisp COLRv1 vector font (left)

Origin Trials

This version of Chrome introduces the Origin Trial feature , where developers can try out new features and provide feedback to the web community on the availability, usefulness, and effectiveness of new features.

New Origin Trial: Region Capture

Region Capture is an API for cropping self-captured video tracks , and currently applications can use getDisplayMedia() to get a capture of the tab they are running in, with or without preferCurrentTab.

Using Region Capture, the resulting video track can be cropped to remove some content from it.

The most typical scenario of this function is to share the screen, or only show a certain part of the screen during a video conference.

Other functions

• Add automatic keyword for contains-intrinsic-size
  contain-intrinsic-sizeThe auto-keyword allows websites to use the element’s last remembered size, without which web developers would have to guess at the rendered size of the element.

• AudioContext. outputLatency property
  The new AudioContext.outputLatencyproperty is an estimate of the audio output delay in seconds. Technically, this is the time interval between when the user agent requests the host system to buffer and when the audio output device processes the first sample in the buffer. ( Implemented in Firefox ).

• CSS Color Adjust: ‘only’ keyword for color schemes
  onlykeyword, which has been re-added to the color-schemespec, and currently supports Chrome . It allows opting out of color schemes for a single specific element. For example to allow overrides to force dimming. for example:

div { color-scheme: light } will force the div element out of the color scheme dark.
div { color-scheme: only light } keeps the color-scheme element light and keeps it from being forced to dim by the user agent.

Deprecation and removal

Remove SDES key exchange for WebRTC

Since 2013, WebRTC’s SDES key exchange mechanism has been declared unacceptable for use in relevant IETF standards.

Its usage in Chrome has dropped significantly over the past year. SDES was removed because it was a security issue.

It exposes the session key to Javascript, which means that an entity that has access to the negotiated exchange, or is capable of breaking Javascript, can decrypt the media sent over the connection.

A more complete introduction to the new features can be found in the official blog .

Chrome 98 Beta Released: Color Gradient Vector Fonts Experimental Region Capture…