Chrome 90 Beta Released With New Origin Trials, AV1 Encode

Written by Michael Larabel in Google on 12 March 2021 at 05:40 AM EST. 2 Comments
GOOGLE
Following last week's Chrome 89 release, Chrome 90 is now available in beta form.

Pushed back from Chrome 89, the Chrome 90 browser release is now shipping with the previously mentioned AV1 encode support for WebRTC usage. Chrome is shipping the libaom implementation for providing AV1 encode support within the web browser focused on real-time video conferencing. The AOMedia reference encoder performance remains quite low but is a step towards improving WebRTC support moving forward.

Google notes in the Chrome 90 beta announcement that AV1 offers better compression efficiency, works better for very low bandwidth networks (30kbps and lower), and offers better screen sharing efficiency over VP9 and other codecs.

Chrome 90 beta also comes with new origin trials around MediaStreamTrack insertable streams, getCurrentBrowsingContextMedia(), WebAssembly exception handling, and WebXR AR lighting estimation.

Chrome 90 is also working on CSS aspect-ration interpolation, custom state pseudo classes, "overflow: clip" CSS property support, and other developer additions.

More details on the newly-released Chrome 90 beta via Chromium.org.
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