Google Chrome 100 Released with New Features, Icon, and More

Google has released Chrome 100 today, March 29th, 2022, to the Stable desktop channel, and it includes a new logo, security improvements, development features, and more.

Today, Google promoted Chrome 100 to the Stable channel, Chrome 101 as the new Beta version, and Chrome 102 will be the Canary version.

Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop users can upgrade to Chrome 100 by going to Settings -> Help -> About Google Chrome. The browser will automatically check for the new update and install it when available.

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In addition to new features and improvements, Chrome 100 fixes 28 security vulnerabilities, with nine being marked as ‘High’ severity, making this a required upgrade for all users.

Below we have highlighted the most significant changes in Google Chrome 100.

New Chome icon

Google Chrome 100 has a new logo with subtle color changes, the removal of shadows, and a slightly larger inner blue circle.

Google already previewed the new logo in the Chrome Canary builds but with the release of Google Chrome 100, it has now come to the Stable release.

While the changes are subtle, you can see the darker colors and better contrasts when seen next to each other.

To learn more about these changes to Google Chrome’s icon, you can read this Twitter thread from Google Chrome designer Elvin Hu.

Some of you might have noticed a new icon in Chrome’s Canary update today. Yes! we’re refreshing Chrome’s brand icons for the first time in 8 years. The new icons will start to appear across your devices soon. pic.twitter.com/aaaRRzFLI1

— Elvin 🌈 (@elvin_not_11) February 4, 2022

User agent uses three-digit version number

With Google Chrome 100, the browser’s user agent string now uses a three-digit version number compared to a two-digit number, as shown below.

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.60 Safari/537.36"

Since September 2021, Google has been testing whether changing the Chrome user agent to three-digit ‘Chrome/100’ would break sites or cause them not to operate properly.

While some sites had issues with the new user agent string, they were quickly fixed by developers to support the three-digit version.

However, if you run into sites that suddenly break after upgrading to Chrome 100 or display unsupported browser messages, you should report it to Google.

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New developer features

New and improved APIs have been added to Google Chrome 100 allowing developers to enhance the functionality of their web apps.

With this release, Google has added the Digital Goods API so that web applications can make in-app purchases using the Google Play Store.

“An API for querying and managing digital products to facilitate in-app purchases from web applications, in conjunction with the Payment Request API (which is used to make the actual purchases),” explains the feature page for the new API.

“The API would be linked to a digital distribution service connected to via the user agent. In Chromium, this is specifically a web API wrapper around the Android Play Billing API.”

Google Chrome 100 also includes a new Multi-Screen Window Placement API that allows web applications to offer multi-screen experiences.

Google has also added new features to the Chrome DevTools, highlighted in their dedicated blog post.