Chrome 73 comes with PWAs on Mac, signed HTTP exchanges, and constructable style sheets

Yesterday, Google released version 73 of its popular web browser. Chrome 73 comes with support for PWAs for MacOS, signed HTTP exchanges for creating portable content, and constructable style sheets.

DuckDuckGo now a default search engine

Interestingly, Chrome 73 comes with a feature to change its default search engine to a to DuckDuckGo which is a more privacy-friendly option. Google acknowledges that it updated the available search engines based on "new usage statistics" from "recently collected data." DuckDuckGo is the preferred search option in more than 60 markets including the United States and the United Kingdom.

Mac OS related updates

Chrome 73 adds support for bringing Progressive Web Apps to Mac OS bringing PWAs to all desktop platforms - Mac, Windows, Chrome OS and Linux. Chrome 73 also includes the long-awaited dark mode for macOS. Dark mode was first announced for Chrome last month, but yesterday’s release has made it official.

Signed HTTP Exchanges

Chrome 73 comes with Signed HTTP Exchanges (SGX) which makes it “possible to create “portable” content that can be delivered by other parties, and this is the key aspect, it retains the integrity and attribution of the original site.” SGX is a part of Web Packages.

Signed HTTP exchanges enables faster content delivery for users, making it possible to get the benefits of a CDN without having to cede control of your certificate’s private key.

Check out Kinuko’s Signed HTTP Exchanges post for details on how to get started.

Constructable style sheets

Chrome 73 users can now create and distribute reusable styles using Constructable Stylesheets. Constructable Stylesheets make it possible to define and prepare shared CSS styles, and then apply those styles to multiple Shadow Roots or the Document easily and without duplication.

To get started, you can create a new instance of CSSStyleSheet, then use either replace or replaceSync to update the stylesheet rules.

Other updates

There is a new regular expression called matchAll(). It is a matching method on the string prototype, and returns an array containing the complete matches.