Chrome 76 Beta Allows Sites to Use Your OS Dark Mode Settings

Google is now rolling out Chrome 76 to the beta channel with dark mode and Payments API improvements, as well as easier to install Progressive Web Apps on the desktop.

The Chrome 76 Beta is available for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows, and it can be downloaded from Google Chrome's official website.

Improvements to dark mode

Chrome 76 Beta now allows websites and web apps to use the prefers-color-scheme CSS media query to quickly switch to the color scheme the user has enabled on his device.

This feature was announced on May 2 when Chromium developer Rune Lillesveen said that there is an intent to ship support for the media query in Chrome 76 allowing sites to find out if their visitors prefer a dark mode, light mode, or have no preference.

Mozilla also added support for this feature with the Firefox 67 release, while Apple already added support for it starting with Safari 12.1.

Payments API improvements

Google also ships several Payments API improvements with the Chrome 76 Beta release, allowing "a merchant website or web app to respond when a user changes payment instruments."

Also, new API methods and event handlers added in this Beta Chrome release will make it possible for developers to send notifications to merchants when clients change payment instruments.

Chrome 76 Beta also "makes it easier to use the payments APIs for self-signed certificates on the local development environment. To do this, launch Chrome from a command line with the —ignore-certificate-errors flag."

Progressive Web Apps improvements

Chrome 76 Beta adds a clear indication to let its users know when a Progressive Web App is installable moving the install button which was previously hidden in the browser's main menu to the omnibox.

This will make it a lot easier to install Progressive Web Apps on the desktop given that Chrome will add the install icon at the end of the address bar whenever a site meets the Progressive Web App installability criteria.

Once the Install button is clicked, the Google Chrome browser will automatically prompt the user to install the Progressive Web App onto his desktop.

A list of other features added to Chrome 76 Beta is available within the table below:

Feature	Description
Animation.updatePlaybackRate	Adds Animation.updatePlaybackRate(), which lets you seamlessly transition the playback rate of an animation such that there is no visible jump in the animation.
Async clipboard: read and write images	Implements programmatic copying and pasting of images for the Async Clipboard API.
Escape key is not a user activation	The escape key is no longer treated as a user activation. Browsers prevent calls to abusable APIs (like popup, fullscreen, vibrate, etc.) unless the user activates the page through direct interactions.
Fetch Metadata	Introduces a new HTTP request header that sends additional metadata about a request's provenance (is it cross-site, is it triggered from , etc.) to the server to allow it to make security decisions which might mitigate some kinds of attacks based on timing the server's response (XSS leaks and others).
form.requestSubmit()	Adds the form.requestSubmit()function, which requests form submission. It includes interactive constraint validation, dispatches a submit event, and takes a reference to the submitter button.
Implement Animation.pending	Adds the pending attribute to the Web Animations API. A pending animation is one that is waiting on an asynchronous operation that affects the play state
IndexedDB transaction explicit commit API call	Adds a commit()function to IDBTransaction objects, which explicitly marks a transaction as not accepting further requests.

A full release timeline for the Google Chrome browser is available HERE, together with a list of all planned features for the Chrome 76 version which will hit the stable channel starting with July 30 according to Google's estimation.