Chrome 103 Stable will be released today, and key new features include significantly improved page loading speeds through a pre-rendering mechanism, new support for AVIF files in Web Share, and support for local font access.
Pre-rendering mechanism
The mechanism will replace No State Prefetch, which is more secure but doesn’t really offer significant performance benefits. 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 introduces 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 have generally preferred to preload from the client of web interaction. The 103 early navigation hints provide a new approach.
This should significantly improve web page loading speed, reduce resource usage, increase code complexity, and address the security and privacy concerns that existed in the initial version of this method. Page loading will also be improved by a new speculative rule in Chrome 103 that will provide “flexible syntax to define which outgoing links are eligible to guess ready before navigating.”
New 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 wants to support it in Web Share to use it further.
Local fonts
Another Chrome 103 feature that is popular with web developers is the ability for web applications to display content using local fonts. Previously, you had to implement a tedious workaround, including uploading font files to the web application’s servers.
Federated Credentials Management (FedCM) API
The Federated Credential Management (FedCM) API is undergoing preliminary testing. This is another step by Google to improve Chrome privacy by allowing users to sign in to web apps using federated identity providers and communicating the details of permission levels to users.
Developer improvements
Speaking of details that developers may be more interested in than consumers, the AbortSignal object is getting a new timeout() method with milliseconds as a parameter, a JavaScript API that can modify ARIA properties directly, a stream of raw deflate compressed methods, an Element.isVisible() method that functions exactly as its name implies, and the ability of Web applications to automatically forget serial ports.
Chrome 103 will also align with Firefox’s behavior by triggering popstate immediately after a URL change, and you can find technical details here. Finally, this time the developers tried out three features. Participating in a developer trial means that you need to enable them from the flags. They are as follows:
Focusgroup
Fullscreen Capability Delegation
Support visual-box on overflow-clip-margin
Chrome 103 will begin rolling out later today. If it doesn’t automatically update you to version 103 throughout the day, go to help > About Google Chrome to trigger an update when it’s available.
