News, Reviews & Betas which includes large community peer support Chrome 97 will be arriving later today. While it features a notable enhancement to communication protocols, it also has a controversial Keyboard API change that is at odds with Apple and Mozilla.
Chrome 96 hit the Stable channel almost two months ago and even though the current release cadence means that we should expect a new build every four weeks, this was not the case with Chrome 97 due to the holiday season in the west. Today, Chrome 97 is finally arriving in the Stable channel, with a notable feature being a new attribute in the Keyboard API, which is proving to be quite controversial. Previously, some web apps like Excel, PowerPoint, and Word could not use the Keyboard API to identify which key has been pressed on a specific layout such as French or English. The addition of the “keyboard-map” value solves this problem and while web developers obviously support it, it has faced strong criticism from Apple’s WebKit team and the development team at Mozilla. Both have voiced privacy concerns, saying that this API exposes a fingerprinting surface that can be used to identify and track you, especially if you’re using a keyboard layout that is uncommon in a region.
