A central hub for all the things that have changed in Chrome
Google Chrome is probably the browser everyone is using. When it launched back in 2008, it was lauded as a super-small, resource-saving program that wasn’t even feature-complete, but that has long changed. After its long and winding march to market domination, the browser received more features, grew in size, and is now known as an absolute resource hog and data collection engine.
But the development never stands still. The Chrome developers keep adding new features to the browser, with equally as many aimed at improving functionality as there are focused on enhancing speed, resource management, and stability.
This hub serves as an overview of what the Chrome developers are up to, and what’s new in every version, with a focus on what regular users can expect — don’t expect a technical deep dive into development. We’ll regularly update it when we cover new Chrome versions and new features, so be sure to bookmark this page or keep coming back to it whenever you want to learn more about what’s new in Chrome.
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Upcoming features still under development
Since Chrome is based on an open-source project, we stumble upon documentation detailing unreleased features that haven’t yet made it into any of the available versions yet. This is what this section showcases.
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‘Copy link to highlight’ to also support images and video
The internet is all about sharing content, and recently we got another powerful tool for helping us do just that. While historically you could only share links to full webpages, or to specific pre-defined “anchor” points within them, these new “text fragments” offered to let us create custom links that highlighted specific passages within a page itself. Now Chrome developers are working to bring us the logical next step: the ability to link to pictures and other media on a page in much the same way.
Chrome wants its ‘copy link to highlight’ feature to also support images and video
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Chrome 98 Dev/Canary
Chrome 98 is currenty on the bleeding edge, with the Chromium developers actively working on features. You can consider this version the playground right now, where new stuff can be introduced on a daily basis, but it’s also the most instable environment. Things can and do break occassionally. Still, this is where the all the fun is happening, and there are always new things to be discovered.
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Privacy Guide
A new Privacy Guide has been added to Chrome for Android as a flag, which means that you can now test it out on your own phone. Privacy Guide will be available in the app’s Settings menu by going into the Privacy and security subsection. It’ll allow you to review different app settings, telling you the purpose of each and what you’re sending Google in order to make that feature work. If something doesn’t sit right with you, you can disable it right from the menu. The flag is available on lower versions than 98, but Chrome 98 is the first to add an interface and workflow for Privacy Guide.
Google’s working on a Privacy Guide feature for Chrome on Android
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Built-in screenshot and editing features for desktop Chrome
Google Chrome for desktop could soon gain a neat feature from its mobile pendant — screenshot edits. Chrome Canary version 98 has received an in-development option that will allow you to capture, edit, and share screenshots. Just like in the mobile version of Chrome, the tool will live in the upcoming share button.
Chrome for desktop might get built-in screenshot and editing features
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Chrome 97 Beta
Chrome 97 was promoted to beta on November 18, 2021. The release brings a few select refinements and improvements, but nothing too earth-shattering. You can expect some simplifications when you want to delete local data saved by a website, enhanced support for international keyboard layouts (yes, that’s a problem to this day), preparations for better HDR support, and some minor PWA advancements.
Here are all the interesting things we’ve found in the release:
Everything that’s new in Chrome 97 Beta
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Per-page zoom options
Sometimes, websites just don’t scale well on mobile screens, and for those of us with less-than-average vision, this means squinting and relying on accessibility services like Force enable zoom. On desktop, there’s a more elegant solution that scales the whole website to make it appear bigger, and judging by a recent update to Chrome Canary 97, this feature is making its way into the mobile version of the browser.
Chrome for Android might be getting this feature previously reserved for desktop
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Chrome 96
Chrome 96 was launched on November 16, 2021. In the link below, you can find a high-level overview of all the interesting new changes we found, while we also offer deep dives into some special features in the collection of articles below.
Everything that’s new in Chrome 96
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Scrolling screenshots on Android 12
Android 12 introduced scrolling screenshots to Pixel phones, but the feature initially didn’t work with Chrome. As of version 96 of the browser, that’s a thing of the past. Google has flipped a switch allowing you to catpure as much or as little as you want of a website.
Chrome finally works with Android 12’s scrolling screenshot tool
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Accessibility: More languages for machine-generated image captions
Google has added a few new languages to its automatic image captioning service in Chrome. It now supports Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish, bringing the total to sixteen supported languages. This was made possible by developing a machine learning model that can simultaneously translate the image caption into each supported language.
One of Chrome’s most useful accessibility features is now available for more users
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Chrome 95
Chrome 95 launched on October 20, 2021 and came with a whole slew of updates. It brought some Material You design elements to the Android browser and some interesting features for developers that help websites perform better.
Read our high-level overview for all the neat new things that came to you in this release.
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