Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Mac, and Windows.

JavaScript modules

Modules allow developers to declare a script's dependencies and are already popular in third-party build tools, which use them to bundle only the required scripts. This release adds native support for JavaScript modules via the new <script type=module> element.

Native support means the browser can fetch granular dependencies in parallel, taking advantage of caching, avoiding duplications across the page, and ensuring the script executes in the correct order, all without a build step.

Payment Request API on desktop

The Payment Request API is now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and ChromeOS, following the announcement of Android support last year. Developers can now offer secure, seamless checkout experiences across platforms. To get started, “check out” our integration guide .

The PaymentRequest process throughout a transaction.

Web Share API

To allow users to easily share content on social networks, developers have had to manually integrate sharing buttons into their site for each social service. This often leads to users not being able to share with the services they actually use, in addition to bloated page sizes and security risks from including third-party code.

Sites can now use the new navigator.share API on Chrome for Android to trigger the native Android share dialog, allowing the user to easily share text or links with any of their installed native apps. In a future release, this API will also be able to share to installed web apps.

The navigator.share API allows the user to share content with a variety of native apps via the native Android share dialog.

WebUSB

Most hardware peripherals such as keyboards, mice, printers, and gamepads are supported by high-level web platform APIs. To use specialized educational, scientific, or industrial USB peripherals, users must find and install potentially unsafe drivers and software with system-level privileges.

Chrome now supports the WebUSB API , allowing web apps to communicate with peripherals given a user's consent. This enables all the functionality provided by these devices, while still preserving the security guarantees of the web.

Other features in this release

Deprecations and interoperability improvements

To increase security, resources with URLs containing both

and < characters will now be blocked .

To increase security, support for the Presentation API’s start function has been deprecated and removed for insecure contexts.

To align with the spec and preserve browser consistency, the scrollingElement is now the documentElement in standards mode .

To increase consistency across on<event> attributes, onwheel attributes have been moved from Element to Window , Document , HTMLElement , and SVGElement .

To better follow spec and provide more granular control over the flow of referred content, Chrome now supports three new Referrer Policy values, same-origin , strict-origin , and strict-origin-when-cross-origin .

Following the change in spec, the maximum value for colSpan has been decreased from 8190 to 1000.