Chrome 119 Beta Released With CSS Relative Color Syntax, WebSQL Disabled

Google engineers on Friday promoted Chrome 119 to its beta stage with some interesting features in tow.

First up, Chrome 119 Beta introduces the CSS Relative Color Syntax "RCS" for defining colors by modifying the parameters of other colors. As an example provided by Google, "oklab(from magenta calc(l * 0.8) a b);" will result in an oklab magenta that is 80% lighter than the original. A variety of other new CSS features are also added with Chrome 119.

As an origin trial feature with Chrome 119 beta, there is support for opening pop-ups as fullscreen windows. There is a new "fullscreen" window features parameter for window.open() that allows for opening new pop-up windows directly as full-screen windows rather than developers needing to handle transitioning new pop-up windows into a full-screen scope.

Meanwhile being dropped from Chrome 119 is WebSQL. Last year Google deprecated WebSQL as the database API for storing structured data on a user's computer. This decade old feature was already abandoned in 2010 and WebKit removed their support in 2019 while Mozilla's Gecko never supported it. WebSQL has been disabled in Chrome 119 with the W3C encouraging use of the Web Storage API instead. A deprecation trial is still available if really needing it while it will be stripped from the codebase for good in Chrome 123.

More details on all of the Chrome 119 beta changes via the Chrome developer blog.