Chrome 81 beta version brings us closer to what we want, Augmented reality

Chrome released its latest beta channel for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows with some modifications and changes in several areas. The Chrome 81 is in beta mode as of February 13^th, 2020.

Chrome 81 introduces the mobile web to NFC with an origin trial. With the help of the web NFC, NFC tags could be read and written to further open up new cases to the web.

Chrome 81 also adds the WebXR Device API and the WebXR Hit Test API, both of which support augmented reality. The WebXR Hit Test API lets the users place a virtual object in a real-world point in the camera view.

As mentioned above, the new version introduces new origin trials which are made keeping in mind the interest of the users. It will allow users to try new features and give feedback to the developers.

The scheduler.postTask method allows developers to sort through and schedule their prioritized tasks at hand. The new PointerLock now comes with the ability to request unadjusted and unaccelerated mouse movement data. Chrome 81 is now equipped to rewrite the URLs to HTTPS without ever going back to HTTP during the absence of secure content.

Other features include the buffered flag of PerformanceObserver to support long tasks, the CSS image-orientation property to respect EXIF metadata within images by default, exclusion of implicit tracks from grid-template-rows, and grid-template-columns, the IntersectionObserver Document Root, modernized appearance of form controls on Windows, ChromeOS, and Linux, the availability of onwebkit{animation,transition}XX handlers on HTMLElement and Document, added support for tracking position state in a media session, support for a SubmitEvent type, addition of ConvolverNode.channelCount and channelCountMode, inclusion of the WorkerOptions object as the second argument for a shared worker constructor, incorporating version 8.1 of the V8 JavaScript engine.

Furthermore, the beta version removes the “basic-card” support payment handler, supported types field from BasicCardRequest. Chrome was having difficulty with determining the accurate card type mainly due to the fact that only issuing banks know the certainty and the card type. Firefox removed “supported types” in version 65, along with TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1.