Chrome 70 Dev Release With Shape Detection API

While Chrome 69 was released last week, today Google has shipped their latest "dev" release of Chrome 70 for interested testers.

New Chrome 70 dev channel releases are available today for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Key features for Chrome 70 is the introduction of the Shape Detection API, disabling some touch event APIs by default on desktop hardware, CSS Grid Layout behavior updates, WebUSB support within dedicated worker contexts, several security enhancements, and various other minor updates.

The Shape Detection API is used for recognizing shapes or features like human faces and QR codes within photos and images. The API is basically for exposing any underlying hardware-accelerated detectors of the device running the browser. This is particularly relevant for Chrome on mobile devices where various hardware-offloaded detection capabilities exist in order for allowing more efficient parsing of images and video content. The Shape Detection API is currently in an editor's draft state.

More details on the Chrome 70 features can be found via ChromeStatus.com and the Chromium Log. Today's brief dev channel update message can be read on the Chrome release blog.