Google Finally releases the Chrome 81 stable version after 21 days of delay. Chrome 81 was planned to release on March 17, however, due to Corona outbreak, the launch was postponed. Now, Today, Google releases the bulky Chrome 81 update that has brought some new features as well as improved some of the existing ones (bug fixes). In this article, we gonna talk about these features in detail.
Web NFC Support
Well those of you who don’t know, Web NFC let websites to read and write NFC tags when devices supporting the same technology falls within the perimeter of 10 cm. The Transmission rate of NFC is upto 424 kbit/s whereas it operates at 13.56 MHz. Web NFC can be useful in several type of websites. For example, A Museum or Art Gallery can use NFC tags to let user get additional information about a product via NFC tags and the Museum or Art Gallery site. If we follow this site, then it says Web NFC is available on Android as an origin trial in Chrome 81, that is expected to end in Chrome 84.
Drops TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 Protocol
TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 Protocol was released back in 1996 and 2006 respectively. Both of these protocols allows website to support HTTPS. Now, because it was quite a time when both of these protocols released, the cryptographic algorithms of both of these protocols are now weak and an attacker crack it to easily get access to a website traffic in plain text. That’s why Chrome team decided and has removed both of these protocols in Chrome 81.
Although Chrome team has dropped TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 from Chrome 81, still, there are more than 8 Lakh sites sporting the same protocol. Among these sites includes Banks, Governments, News and Media companies. However, Back in 2018, Major browser vendors already notified they gonna drop support of TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 in March 2020.
Well, the latest versions of TLS protocol include TLS 1.2 released in 2008 and TLS 1.3 released in 2017. Sites using any of these two Transport Layer Security protocol works with no issues.
UI Improvement of Form Elements
Chrome 81 has also brought improved User Interface for Form Elements. You can read more about it here or to get an overview you can see in the below screenshot.
Web XR Device API Support
The Web XR Device API support was first brought into Chrome in version 79 but was in testing from back then. Now Chrome 81, releases the same API in stable form, that means the browser is now able to render 3D scenes to hardware designed for presenting Virtual words via Virtual reality or add graphical imagery to the real word via Augmentated Reality. You can read more about Web XR API from here and here.
Well, these are the importaint set of features I found in Chrome 81. To know, all the features and bug fixes Chrome 81 has brought, you can read it from here.
Read also: How Chrome Tab Grouping Simplify User Interactions?
