Chrome 33 beta brings Custom Elements, speech synthesis API, & web payments on Mac

Following the release of Chrome 32 on Google’s stable release channel, today Chrome 33 has moved into beta bringing access to Custom Elements, a Web Speech API for speech recognition and synthesis, and more. The new Custom Elements will allow developers to add new HTML elements in web applications in “much cleaner ways” as highlighted by Google in the sample code for a chat app above. With the spec developers will able to:

1. Define new HTML/DOM elements
2. Create elements that extend from other elements
3. Logically bundle together custom functionality into a single tag
4. Extend the API of existing DOM elements

The release also includes access to the Web Speech API for adding speech recognition and synthesis features to web pages. Google gives the example of dictations being “synthesized to play back in a different language.” Google described some of the other updates in the release including the availability of the requestAutocomplete API for easily implementing web payments on Mac:

Other web platform changes in this release

• The requestAutocomplete API for easy web payments is now available on Mac.
• The Page Visibility API has been unprefixed.
• WebFont downloading has been optimized so that fonts (at the median) are available before Blink layout is done, meaning that the net latency impact of using a webfont is usually zero.
• The Blink CSS Animations and Transitions implementations are now powered by the newWeb Animations model. This change should not affect developers or sites; let us know if it does.
• Chrome now supports the latest version of the Web Notification API. We’ll be deprecating support for the legacy API down the road, so please update your websites if they’re using it.