Chrome 97 Released With WebTransport API

Google this afternoon promoted the Chrome 97 web browser to its stable series.

Chrome 97 is admittedly not too exciting on the end-user feature front, but it does come with several developer additions. Exciting me the most at least with Chrome 97 is the introduction of the WebTransport API as a WebSockets-like interface. 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.

WebTransport is currently in a W3C working draft state.

Chrome 97 also adds CSS media queries for HDR display detection, new JavaScript methods, more native looking Web Apps support, and more. See ChromeStatus.com for a look at the Chrome 97 features.

The Chrome Release Blog also covers many security fixes addressed in today's Chrome 97 release.