Today’s Chrome Beta channel release introduces a new HTML attribute for responsive images and the unprefixed version of the JavaScript Web Audio API. Unless otherwise noted, changes apply to desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome for Android.
The srcset attribute
other devices with heterogeneous screen sizes and device pixel ratios . Serving the same image resources to all devices can lead to slower page load times, wasted bandwidth and improperly formatted content.
srcset
<img alt="A rad wolf." src="pic1x.jpg" srcset="pic1x.jpg 1x, pic2x.jpg 2x, pic4x.jpg 4x">
srcset , but it’s good for backwards compatibility. Kudos to external Blink developer Yoav Weiss for implementing and driving consensus for this feature. Stay tuned for the <picture> element , which will also help web developers with responsive design.
Unprefixed Web Audio
Web Audio API is a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications. We shipped the prefixed version of the API a few years ago. Starting with this release, the unprefixed API entry points audioContext and offlineAudioContext will be available in addition to their prefixed counterparts. Legacy methods such as createGainNode and createDelayNode are deprecated.
W3C draft specification and offers compatibility with the Web Audio support in Firefox. Please switch to the unprefixed versions soon, as the prefixed versions are now officially deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
UPDATE April, 9th: Unprefixed Web Audio will ship in Chrome 35, not Chrome 34. Other web platform changes in this release
The font-variant-ligatures CSS property allows developers to control ligatures in text.
A variety of infrequently used web platform features have been deprecated or removed. For a complete list, see the list of Blink “intents” .
As we’ve previously discussed , Chrome will now offer to remember and fill password fields in the presence of autocomplete=off . This change does not affect non-password fields.
If you’ve ever been curious about the usage of HTML and JavaScript features, check out the updated chromestatus.com/metrics , which now shows the percentage of page loads that use certain web platform features.
chromestatus.com/features for a complete overview of Chrome’s developer features, and circle +Google Chrome Developers for more frequent updates!
