Chrome 108 has arrived: What’s new?

Great news everybody! Here’s some news that has absolutely nothing to do with Black Friday, Cyber Week, or any other kind of deal. Today, we’re talking Chrome. More specifically, the last update of 2022 for the Chrome browser for desktop devices. Yesterday, Google officially rolled out Chrome 108 for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The next update won’t arrive until the second week of 2023 and while there isn’t a lot to talk about, 108 has some nifty new features you should know about. So, here’s what’s new in Chrome 108.

Sharper Emojis

Chrome 98 introduced support for COLRv1 Color Gradient Vector Fonts which produce sharper emojis that are more scalable. In Chrome 108, websites will now have the ability to detect if a browser supports COLRv1 and in turn, display crisper emoji images. Sharp.

Battery Saver Mode

Google has been working on some battery and memory-saving features for Chrome and ChromeOS for months and some of those tools have finally appeared in the Stable build of the browser. Still disabled behind a flag, battery saver mode can be set to enable when your device is off charge or when your battery drops below 20%. Once you update to 108, you can enable the flag by pointing your browser to chrome://flags/#battery-saver-mode-available and setting the flag to the enable position. Restart your browser and you’re good to go.

Dev Tools

That’s about it on the front end. There are some changes under the hood and you can learn more about those on the Chromium Developer blog and the video below from the Chrome Devs.

In addition to these updates, Chrome 108 also contains a slew of bug fixes and security patches. On the Chrome Release Blog, you can find details on more than twenty security updates that netted developers more than $70K in bug bounties and rewards. To check for the update to Chrome 108, head to the three-dot menu at the top-right of your Chrome browser and click Help > About Google Chrome.