Chrome 94 Beta Released With WebCodecs API Promoted, WebGPU Origin Trial

Google promoted Chrome 94 to beta status today with some exciting changes.

First up, Chrome 94 Beta marks the completion of the WebCodecs API under its origin trial and thus now officially available. WebCodecs is the low-level codec API around audio/video encoding and decoding along with raw video frame handling and more. WebCodecs API handling is intended to be more efficient than JavaScript or WebAssembly codec implementations.

Meanwhile entering the original trial phase with Chrome 94 is WebGPU! WebGPU is in Chrome 94 Beta with aims to be promoted in Chrome 99. WebGPU is the successor to WebGL and is a much more modern graphics API that can also support GPU compute. WebGPU exposes features inline with Vulkan, Direct3D 12, and Metal.

Chrome 94 Beta also brings support for a new "postTask" method for its scheduling API, canvas color management has left the original trial state, and the VirtualKeyboard API has also left the original trial period. Chrome 94 is also deprecating WebSQL for third-party contexts.

More details on all of the changes to find with today's Chrome 94 Beta via the Chromium blog. Further feature information on Chrome 94 in its current form can be found via ChromeStatus.com.