Chrome 65 rolling out to Mac, Windows, Linux w/ new developer & security features

Abner Li | Mar 6 2018 - 2:26 pm PT

Rolling out ahead of the Android variant with this version, Chrome 65 is now available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. This update focusses on introducing several new features that developers can take advantage of, as well as security improvements.

With the CSS Paint API, developers can have the browser draw an image instead of referencing/including an image resource, which significantly uses less data.

CSS Paint API allows you to programmatically generate an image whenever a CSS property expects an image. Properties like background-image or border-image are usually used with url() to load an image file or with CSS built-in functions like linear-gradient(). Instead of using those, you can now use paint(myPainter) to reference a paint worklet.

A Server Timing API allows developers to better measure the performance of web applications by being able to capture both the speed of the client and the server.

Google is also adding support for a Web Authentication API to “allow the creation and use of strong, attested, cryptographic scoped credentials by web applications, for the purpose of strongly authenticating users.” It can be enabled via a flag.

On the security front, the browser now supports draft-23 of the TLS 1.3 protocol responsible for secure communication on the web. The latest version is faster, more secure, and has already supported on Gmail.

Meanwhile, a small visual change brings a revamp of the Extensions page with Material Design, cards, and toggles. It is currently live on macOS. There is also a new Material download bar.