Web Platform

Read the documentation for Web Platform APIs, some of which are experimental in Chrome. For example, origin and developer trials, or features only found in Canary.

What are Chrome release channels?

Learn how Chrome uses Canary, Dev, Beta, and Stable release channels to test new features, and roll out updates.

What are Chrome flags?

Activate additional debugging tools, or try out new or experimental features.

What is a Chrome Finch experiment?

Learn how we safely roll out new features and changes to Chrome.

Shipped APIs

Page Lifecycle API

The Page Lifecycle API provides lifecycle hooks so your pages can safely handle these browser interventions without affecting the user experience.

Early Hints

Early Hints is an HTTP status code (103 Early Hints) used to send a preliminary HTTP response ahead of a final response.

Picture-in-Picture for any Element

Display arbitrary HTML content in an always-on-top window.

Better screen sharing with Conditional Focus

Conditionally focus a tab or window when screen sharing on the web.

Privacy-preserving screen sharing controls

Guide the user away from oversharing thanks to privacy-preserving screen sharing controls on the web.

Better tab sharing with Capture Handle

The web platform now ships with Capture Handle, a mechanism that allows a capturing web app to ergonomically and confidently identify the captured web app, if the captured web app has opted-in.

Recognize your users' handwriting

The Handwriting Recognition API allows web applications to use advanced handwriting recognition services to recognize text from handwritten input in real time.

Navigation API

Discover modern client-side routing with the Navigation API, which adds improved functionality to build single-page applications.

Better tab sharing with Region Capture

The web platform now ships with Region Capture, a performant and robust way for cropping a video track.

Capture a video stream from any element

The Element Capture API is a performant and robust way for transforming a capture of the current tab into a capture of a DOM subtree.

Scroll and zoom a captured tab

The Captured Surface Control API lets web apps scroll and zoom captured tabs.

Full control with the VirtualKeyboard API

Manage yourself the browser deals with content occlusion when a touch device's virtual keyboard appears.

Smooth and simple transitions with the View Transition API

The View Transition API lets you create seamless visual transitions between different views on your website.

Prefetch and prerender pages with the Speculation Rules API

Use the Speculation Rules API to achieve near-instant page navigations

Long Animation Frames (LoAF)

Use the Long Animation Frames API to identify slow animation frames which are likely to affect the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) Core Web Vital metric which measures responsiveness.

Back/forward cache notRestoredReasons API

Report information on whether a page was blocked from using the back/forward cache on navigation.

Get started with origin trials

Test a new or experimental web platform feature.

Third-party origin trials

Providers of embedded content can test new or experimental web platform features.

Troubleshoot origin trials

Address common problems with Chrome trial tokens in meta tags, headers, and scripts.

Origin trials

Origin trials allow developers to try out new features and give feedback.

Launch Handler API

Control how your app is launched, for example, whether it uses an existing or a new window and whether the chosen window is navigated to the launch URL.

Measure soft navigations

Experimenting with JavaScript-driven same-document navigations that use the history API or the new Navigation API, triggered by a user gesture and modifies the DOM, modifying the previous content, as well as the URL displayed to the user.

Compute Pressure API

Allow your implementation to use the right underlying hardware metrics to ensure that users can take advantage of all the processing power available to them

Device Bound Session Credentials

Enhance your web application's security by integrating Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) to protect against session hijacking.

Deprecating

These features were part of the web platform but are now in the process of being deprecated and removed.

Deprecating the unload handler

The unload event will be gradually deprecated starting from Chrome 117. Learn what this means and how sites and enterprises can prepare for this

No longer pursuing

These features are no longer supported nor in experiment.

Declarative Link Capturing

Determine declaratively what happens when the browser is asked to navigate to a URL.

Storage Foundation API

Gain direct access to stored data through buffers and offsets.

Notification triggers

Schedule local notifications that don't require a network connection

Web Bundles

Share websites as a single file over Bluetooth.

Best Practices

Learn how to make the most of certain web platform features.

URL protocol handler registration for PWAs

After registering a PWA as a protocol handler, when a user clicks on a hyperlink with a specific scheme such as mailto, bitcoin, or web+music from a browser or a platform-specific app, the registered PWA will open and receive the URL.

Video processing with WebCodecs

Work with components of a video stream, such as frames and unmixed chunks of encoded video or audio.