Chrome 99: CSS Cascade Layers, a New Picker for Input Elements, and More

There are some exciting new things slated for Chrome version 99 — currently in beta and to become stable on March 1st. Standout features are the shipping of CSS Cascade Layers and the new showPicker() Method on HTMLInputElement Objects. On the Chrome Developers Blog, Una Kravets wrote a post that covers Cascade Layers in detail. …

Life of a Pixel

Interesting talk from “Chromium University 2020”, digging into Chrome’s Rendering Pipeline. A tour of the internals of Chromium’s rendering architecture, tracing the steps in the pipeline from web content to display pixels. Concretizes high-level concepts with pointers to important classes and data structures in the codebase While the main concepts — such as a Main …

Chromium Eye Dropper Browser Extension

Leveraging Chromium’s built-in EyeDroper API —which I wrote about earlier this year— Patrick Brosset created an extension for Chromium that allows you to pick a color from anywhere on your screen. In an accompanying blogpost he also explains how he built it: Back when I worked on the [EyeDroper API] article, I got interested in …

RenderingNG: The next-generation rendering architecture for Chrome

RenderingNG is a re-architecture of the entire rendering pipeline of Chrome, for greatly improved reliability, scalability and extensibility. Listen in to find out how it works and why it makes the web better. Thanks to these advancements we get better rendering of tables, container queries support, features like Scroll-Linked Animations, etc. Related: RenderingNG — Ready …

Key data structures and their roles in RenderingNG

Digging deeper into Chromium’s RenderingNG architecture, this post explains its key data structures: Frame trees, The immutable fragment tree, Property trees, Display lists and paint chunks, and Compositor frames. Let’s dig into the key data structures that are inputs and outputs to the rendering pipeline. Would love to see this as a talk at a …

RenderingNG — Ready for the next generation of web content

In the post on TablesNG, we looked at some of the features this under-the-hood rewrite for tables in Chromium provides us. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, as the Chromium team have also been working on a whole new rendering engine architecture, named RenderingNG. In 2021, we will largely complete the process of …