Google Chrome 99 Enters Beta With New Developer Features

Following this week's release of Chrome 98 stable, Google has now promoted Chrome 99 to beta status.

Next month will bring Chrome 99 stable and then it's onto Chrome 100... With Chrome 99 beta most of the changes are for web developers to make use of moving forward. Chrome 99 beta highlights include:

- Support for CSS Cascade Layers as a structured way to organize and balance concerns within a single origin to achieve certain cascade ordering for same-origin rules.

- The showPicker() method for HTMLInputElement objects to allow programmatically showing a browser picker for input elements. This is a more standardized way, for example, to show a browser's date picker for a given input fied.

- Dark mode support for Web Apps has entered an origin trial.

- The Handwriting Recognition API for letting web applications leverage handwriting recognition services of the underlying OS for real-time hand-written text recognition has successfully completed its origin trial.

- Chrome's 2D canvas rendering context has picked up various features from new events to a reset method to conic gradients to better handling SVG filters and other additions for developers.

More details on the changes to find with the Chrome 99 beta via the Chromium blog and ChromeStatus.com.