14 DAY TRIAL // Google promoted today the Chrome 69 web browser from the Developer channel to the Beta one for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows, giving us a first look at the new features and improvements.
One of the coolest new features that will be available on the Google Chrome 69 release when it launches next month its support for the next-generation and efficient AV1 video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. AV1 promises to fix the current video streaming issues supported by most users by improving the compression efficiency with up to 30% compared to existing codecs.
Mozilla Foundation, the maker of the popular Firefox web browser, recently launched a campaign for the adoption of the AV1 video codec by major video streaming and hosting companies, such as YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and numerous other television companies across the globe, in an attempt to finally replace the patented, resource-hungry technology known as the H.264 video codec.
"Chrome 69 adds an AV1 decoder into Chrome Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS) based on the official bitstream specification. At this time, support is limited to "Main" profile 0 and does not include encoding capabilities," said Google. "The supported container is ISO-BMFF (MP4) (see From raw video to web ready for a brief explanation of containers).
Google Chrome 69 will supports display notches
With the upcoming Google Chrome 69 release, the web browser has learned some new CSS tricks, including conic gradients for allowing color transitions around a center instead of radiating from it, support for new margin, border, and padding properties, support for CSS scroll snap positions, and support for display cutouts a.k.a. display notches, which Google also implemented in the soon-to-be-released Android P mobile operating system.
Furthermore, Google Chrome 69 promises a new interface called OffscreenCanvas that allows 2D and WebGL canvases rendering contexts to be used in Workers, which improves performance on multi-core systems and parallelism in web apps, several new JavaScript APIs, a new Keyboard Map API, support for selecting text inside ligatures, WebRTC improvements, and much more.
Google Chrome 69.0.3497.23 is now available for download on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating system if you want to give the new features and improvements a try. However, we don't recommend using beta software for any production work, so make sure you install Google Chrome 69 on a testing machine or a computer that you don't use in a production environment.