Chrome 97 Beta Released With WebTransport API, HDR Media Queries

With Chrome 96 released, Google has now promoted Chrome 97 to beta as the next iteration of their web browser.

Most notable with today's Chrome 97 beta release is initial support for WebTransport. WebTransport is a protocol framework similar to WebRTC data channels but principally for clients constrained by the web security model to communicate with a remote server using a secure, multi-plexed transport. WebTransport uses the HTTP/3 protocol for bidirectional transport. Unlike WebSockets that is TCP-based, WebTransport relies on UDP-like datagrams and cancellable streams. Learn more about WebTransport via the W3C working draft at W3.org.

Chrome 97 beta also introduces CSS media queries to know if the device's display supports High Dynamic Range (HDR). Additionally, on the developer front, Chrome 97 beta also introduces JavaScript methods of findLast and findLastIndex as part of the Array.prototype. As implied by the method names, they are for easily finding the last matching element in an array, rather than having to reverse the array or other non-trivial modifications to easily find the last matching element in an array.

The Chrome 97 beta release was announced at Chrome's release blog. More details on the changes coming for Chrome 97 can be found via ChromeStatus.com.