Chrome 72 Beta releases with public class fields, user activation, and more

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Google yesterday released Chrome 72 Beta for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. This version comes with support for public class fields, a user activation query API, and more.

Public class fields

You can now declare public class fields in scripts, which can be either initialized or uninitialized. To implement public class fields, you need to declare them inside a class declaration but outside of any member functions. Support for private class fields will be added in the future releases.

User activation query API

Chrome 72 Beta comes with user activation query API, using which you can check whether there has been a user activation. This is introduced to avoid annoying web page behaviors such as autoplay. Additionally, it enables embedded iframes to examine postMessage() calls to determine whether they occurred within the context of a user activation.

Well-formed JSON.stringify

Previously, JSON.stringify used to return ill-formed Unicode strings if the input had any lone surrogates. To solve this, well-formed JSON.stringify outputs escape sequences for lone surrogates, making its output valid Unicode and representable in UTF-8.

What are the modules removed?

Popups during page unload is not allowed: Pages will not use window.open() to open a new page during unloading anymore.
HTTP-Based Public Key Pinning (HPKP) is removed: HPKP was introduced to allow websites to send an HTTP header that pins one or more of the public keys present in the site’s certificate chain. But it has seen very low adoption and can also create risks of denial of service and hostile pinning.
Rendering FTP resources deprecated: Rendering resources from FTP servers is now not allowed. Directory listings will still be generated, but any non-directory listing will be downloaded rather than rendered in the browser.

Along with these updates, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are deprecated and removal is expected in Chrome 81.

Read the detailed list of updates on Chromium’s blog.