Chrome 115 Beta Brings Borderless Mode Developer Trial For Web Apps

Following yesterday's release of Chrome 114, Google today promoted the Chrome 115 series to beta.

One of the interesting developer trial features with Chrome 115 is the introduction of a borderless mode for isolated web apps. Under this experimental borderless mode, installed desktop web apps will take responsibility for the entire window -- including the title bar and windowing control buttons such as close / minimize / maximize. The web app developer is responsible for drawing and input handling for the entire window.

This does raise some security/spoofing concerns to which this feature is being limited at least for now to only isolated web apps and the users have to opt-in to the feature via a window management permission prompt or admin policies. The conventional title bar can be returned via the app settings or disabling the borderless window mode capability.

Borderless web app example screenshot.

More details on this borderless mode for web apps here.

Another interesting experimental feature for developers in Chrome 115 is the Compute Pressure API for exposing a CPU load calculation to represent the state of pressure on the client system. This is intended for intensive web apps to help ensure they aren't causing unmanaged stress on the client system. In the future it may be extended to cover items like temperature and battery status too.

Some of the other changes coming with Chrome 115 include the CSS display property with multiple values, boolean context style container queries, new scroll-driven animations additions, the Storage Buckets API, the new WGSLLanguageFeatures for WebGPU,

More details on today's Chrome 115 beta release via developer.chrome.com and ChromeStatus.com. The Chrome 115 stable release should be out in mid-July.