Chrome 81 release was planned for March 17, but it is now rolling out due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Google recently announced an adjusted release schedule for Chrome to keep Chrome’s stability, security, and reliability. According to this release schedule, they will skip Chrome 82. Chrome 83 will be released three weeks earlier than planned, in mid-May.
Major features
Improved support for WebXR and initial support for the Web NFC standard are the major features of Chrome 81. The developers planned to remove the TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 encryption protocols from Chrome in this release, but the team decided to delay removing these two protocols due to the current COVID-19 outbreak. They think that some of the Chrome 81 users can’t access critical government healthcare sites that were still using TLS 1.0 and 1.1.
Origin trials
Chrome 81 comes with origin trials like the new Web NFC API. With the new Web NFC API, reading and writing to NFC tags do not require a particular app installed on the user phones. This new API can be used in museums, art galleries, conferences, and more. Intranets and other corporate sites can share configuration and initial secrets across an organization through Web NFC API. After the trials that run from Chrome 81 to Chrome 83, developers will create apps. There are other origin trials in Chrome 81. You can see the list of the origin trials here.
The media session API now supports the tracking position state. It enables users to see where they are on a track and easily skip back or forwards. In addition to this, the INTL API provides a DisplayNames method that gets the localized names of languages, currency, and other commonly used names.
There are other features and tools in the release, including Buffered Flag for Long Tasks, CSS image-orientation property, CSS Color Adjust: color-scheme, and more. Also, it is needed to note that Chrome now supports a SubmitEvent type, position state for media sessions.