Chrome 71 is now out!

Yesterday, Google announced the release of Chrome 71. This version comes with support for displaying relative time, specifying the underline location for vertical text, user activation for speech synthesis, and more.

Some of the updates in Chrome 71 are described here:

Intl.RelativeTimeFormat() support to display relative time

Showing relative time in web apps has become a common practice and many date/time libraries come with localized functions to handle this for us. One of the examples of these libraries is Moment JS. Chrome 71 introduces Intl.RelativeTimeFormat(), a low-level API that allows libraries and frameworks to format relative time in a localized fashion.

Specifying the underline location for vertical text

Often, browsers are inconsistent with where to put the underline, when it comes to displaying Chinese or Japanese text. This is solved in Chrome 71, as the text-underline-position property now accepts left or right as part of the CSS3 text decoration spec.

Speech synthesis requires user activation

Sometimes it is quite odd when we open a site and it suddenly starts talking to us. Though autoplay policies prevent these sites from automatically playing audio, they have tried to get around this by using speech synthesis API.

To avoid this, in Chrome 71, the speech synthesis API now requires user activation on the page before it will work. If the document has not received a user activation, the speechSynthesis.speak() function now throws an error.

Customizable requestFullscreen API

Developers can now customize the requestFullscreen API with FullscreenOptions on Android. They can choose between showing the navigation bar or a completely immersive mode where no user agent controls are shown until a gesture is performed.

Default credentials mode defaults to same-origin

For module script requests, the default credentials mode has been changed from “omit” to “same-origin”. This is done because the previous behavior was misaligned with other high-level features like the Fetch API. Defaulting to origin also caused a second server connection, which is undesirable for developers looking to reduce latency.

Deprecations and removals in Chrome 71

WebKitAnimationEvent and WeKitTransitionEvent, the non-standard aliases for two widely supported standard interfaces are now fully replaced by AnimationEvent and TransitionEvent respectively.

URL.createObjectURL() has been removed from the MediaStream interface.

The document.origin property has been removed as it is now redundant with self.origin which can be used in both window and worker contexts and has wider support.