The stable version of Chrome 103 will be released today, and the main new features of the new version include significantly improved page loading speed through the pre-rendering mechanism, new support for AVIF files in Web Share, and support for local font access.
Pre-rendering mechanism
This mechanism would replace No State Prefetch, which is more secure but doesn’t really provide a significant performance benefit. That’s why Google went back to the drawing board to support the “103 Early Hints HTTP” response code. Google describes the work as follows:
HTTP/2 introduced the concept of server push, a mechanism that allows the server to preemptively send data to the client. Server Push is designed to improve site performance. In the years since developers generally prefer preloading from the client-side of web interactions. 103 Early Navigation Tips offer a new approach.
This should significantly improve page load times, reduce resource usage, increase code complexity, and address security and privacy issues that were present in the initial version of this method. Page loading will also be improved with new speculative rules in Chrome 103, which will provide “a flexible syntax for defining which outgoing links are eligible to be speculatively prepared before navigation”.
Added support for AVIF files in Web Share
Web Share now supports AVIF files (.avif extension). AVIF is a more efficient format than JPEG, and Google hopes to support it in Web Share to further use it.
Local fonts
Another Chrome 103 feature that’s been welcomed by web developers is the ability for web applications to use native fonts to display content. Previously, tedious workarounds had to be implemented, including uploading font files to the web application’s server.
Federated Credentials Management (FedCM) API
The Federated Credentials Management (FedCM) API is undergoing preliminary testing. It’s another move by Google to improve Chrome’s privacy by allowing users to log into web applications using a federated identity provider and communicate permission level details to users.
Developer improvements
Coming to details that might be of more interest to developers than consumers, AbortSignal objects are getting a new timeout() method that takes milliseconds as an argument, a JavaScript API to directly modify ARIA properties, a raw deflate compression method stream, a The Element.isVisible() method, which does exactly what its name implies, and the ability for a web application to automatically forget about the serial port.
Chrome 103 will also align with Firefox’s behavior by triggering popstate immediately after a URL change, you can find technical details here. Finally, this time the developers tried out three functions. Enrolling in a developer trial means enabling them from the flags. They are as follows:
- Focus group
- Fullscreen Capability Delegation
- Support visual-box on overflow-clip-margin
Chrome 103 will begin rolling out later today. If it doesn’t automatically update to version 103 for you during the day, go to Help > About Google Chrome to trigger an update when it becomes available.
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