Chrome 91 Beta Brings Experimental WebTransport, WebAssembly SIMD By Default

Following last week's release of Chrome 90, Google on Thursday debuted their beta of next month's Chrome 91 web browser.

Exciting with Chrome 91 is WebTransport being added as an experimental origin trial. WebTransport is a new protocol framework / standard for communicating with a remote server using a secure multiplexed transport method. WebTransport is an alternative to WebSockets and provides an API for bi-directional traffic using UDP-like datagrams.

WebTransport is currently available as an Editor's Draft via the W3C on GitHub. WebTransport there is summed up as "to send data to and receive data from servers. It can be used like WebSockets but with support for multiple streams, unidirectional streams, out-of-order delivery, and reliable as well as unreliable transport."

Meanwhile being promoted out of the original trial phase is the WebAssembly SIMD support. WebAssembly SIMD is for making use of the system's SIMD instruction capabilities within WebAssembly but in a platform independent manner.

Details on these and other changes can be found via the Chromium.org blog. ChromeStatus.com also has a list of Chrome 91 changes building up including the GravitySensor API, WebSockets over HTTP/2, and the other interesting bits.