The Managed In-App Payments feature simplifies the developer experience of our previous solution and expands it to extensions. You can now create and manage all of your in-app products directly in the developer dashboard instead of having to embed or dynamically generate and serve a payment token for each sale. You can enable or disable products, provide localized descriptions, set prices for different regions and the Chrome Web Store manages the licensing.
The Free Trial feature, which is now available for Chrome Packaged Apps and Extensions, allows a developer to specify that an item can be used for a limited time before it must be purchased. This gives users the flexibility to try paid items before deciding to buy them.
In addition to making it easier to monetize your Web Store items, we have now made it easier to publish them. Our Chrome Web Store API has been expanded to allow developers to programmatically create, update and publish items in the Web Store. If you have an automated build and deployment process, we hope you will be able to use this API to integrate the Web Store publishing flow into your existing process.
Note that the src attribute is not needed for browsers that support srcset, but it’s good for backwards compatibility. Kudos to external Blink developer Yoav Weiss for implementing and driving consensus for this feature. Stay tuned for the <picture> element, which will also help web developers with responsive design.
Unprefixed Web Audio
The Web Audio API is a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications. We shipped the prefixed version of the API a few years ago. Starting with this release, the unprefixed API entry points audioContext and offlineAudioContext will be available in addition to their prefixed counterparts. Legacy methods such as createGainNode and createDelayNode are deprecated.
This brings Chrome’s implementation of Web Audio in alignment with the W3C draft specification and offers compatibility with the Web Audio support in Firefox. Please switch to the unprefixed versions soon, as the prefixed versions are now officially deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
UPDATE April, 9th: Unprefixed Web Audio will ship in Chrome 35, not Chrome 34.
A variety of infrequently used web platform features have been deprecated or removed. For a complete list, see the list of Blink “intents”.
As we’ve previously discussed, Chrome will now offer to remember and fill password fields in the presence of autocomplete=off. This change does not affect non-password fields.
If you’ve ever been curious about the usage of HTML and JavaScript features, check out the updated chromestatus.com/metrics, which now shows the percentage of page loads that use certain web platform features.