On February 11, Google pushed Chrome 146 to the desktop platform test channel, opening the next phase of browser function and developer feature testing for a wider range of users. The most watched highlight of this update is the promotion of WebNN (Web Neural Network API) to Origin Trial, paving the way for direct invocation of local neural network inference acceleration hardware in the browser.
WebNN is a set of web-oriented neural network programming interfaces that aim to make full use of available inference acceleration resources on user devices, such as NPUs, GPUs, or other machine learning-specific units, as well as native AI/ML capabilities provided by the operating system. With this interface, web applications and front-end frameworks can more efficiently call local hardware to perform inference calculations, thereby providing a richer and smoother machine learning experience at the web page level. However, allowing websites and web applications to further "fill up" local hardware resources may also cause some users to worry about performance usage and privacy security.
For developers who are not familiar with WebNN, Google provides a feature description page and a GitHub sample project to quickly get started with the capabilities and usage of this API. In the Chrome 146 beta, WebNN is available as an Origin trial, allowing website operators and developers to conduct experimental deployments and performance evaluations in a controlled environment.
In addition to WebNN, Chrome 146 beta also introduces the Sanitizer API, which provides safer and easier-to-use protection mechanisms when processing arbitrary user-entered HTML content. The API is designed to simplify the process of filtering and cleaning potentially malicious tags, reduce developers' implementation burden in defending against XSS (cross-site scripting attacks), and make it easier to build web applications without script injection vulnerabilities.
This beta version also includes several WebGPU-related updates, support for scroll-triggered animation effects, and other new and improved features for developers. Developers and interested users can obtain more detailed version update instructions and feature progress through the Chrome Releases official blog and ChromeStatus website.