Chrome 96 Beta Begins Preparing For Chrome 100, Adds Priority Hints Feature

Following this week's release of Chrome 95, Google has now promoted Chrome 96 to beta status.

Next year Chrome will see version 100 and for ensuring a smooth transition, Chrome 96 Beta is adding a new flag to force the major version to already be advertised as version 100. The new developer-minded option will set the Chrome HTTP user-agent string to Chrome 100, for helping developers test their web sites / web applications against that three digit version number. As some particularly older scripts may be just checking for the two major digits, Google developers added this option early to help catch any areas that may not be correctly handling a three digit major version number.

An interesting change with Chrome 96 Beta is the introduction of priority hints via an "importance" attribute with allowing auto/low/high values. The priority hints are used for helping to set the importance of resources being loaded.

Chrome 96 Beta also brings the back-forward cache to the desktop, the ":autofill" pseudo class for CSS, the font-synthesis CSS property is now implemented, a new media query of "prefers-contrast", and various WebAssembly improvements.

More details on the Chrome 96 beta changes via the Chromium.org blog. More details on the Chrome 96 new features can be found at ChromeStatus.com. The Chrome 96.0 stable release is due around 16 November.