Chrome 69 Brings UI Refinement, Initial AV1 Decoder, Picture-In-Picture API

While Firefox is hitting version 62 this week, Google has introduced Chrome 69 as the newest version of their cross-platform web-browser that recently celebrated its tenth birthday.

With this Chrome 69 browser update there is a visual refresh to the user-interface as Google developers adopted the Material 2 design principles for the desktop browser. Chrome 69 also has various security improvements, CSS conic gradients support, CSS scroll snap positions, and various other developer additions.

Chrome 69 also has initial support for AV1 video decoding though in this release it's only for the desktop versions of Chrome, limited to Main Profile 0, doesn't support AV1 encoding, and only works with the MP4 ISO-BMFF container.

The Picture-in-Picture API allows for the creation of floating video windows that will always be positioned on top of other windows. The PIP API only works with HTML5 video elements.

Chrome 69 can be fetched from Google.com.

Update: It turns out at the last minute Google delayed the AV1 decoding functionality to Chrome 70. It was enabled for 69 prior to being reverted.