New Chrome features introduced at Google I/O 2026

The Chrome DevRel keynote, led by Paul Kinlan, focused on changes to prepare for an era in which agents navigate the web. Sites will expose their capabilities to agents, developer tools will align with the latest web standards, and Chrome's future roadmap was also presented.

• WebMCP: A proposed specification that exposes HTML forms and JavaScript functions as tools agents can use. Browser tabs share a list of tools without needing a separate server, and imperative registration is also supported via navigator.modelContext.registerTool.
• Advantages: Because logged-in state, cookies, and local storage can be used as-is, this approach stays closer to the browser context than an external MCP server. Expedia is experimenting with this approach, and it will be available as an Origin Trial in Chrome 149.
• Modern Web Guidance: A skill pack installed via npx modern-web-guidance install that provides recommended patterns for performance, security, identity, and over 100 use cases. It also guides fallbacks and progressive enhancement in conjunction with Baseline.
• DevTools for Agents: AI tools can now directly work with the console, network, memory traces, accessibility tree, and Lighthouse. Additions include DevTools skills, a CLI, a TypeScript API for CI, connecting to a running Chrome instance, multi-agent control, and automatic extension installation and debugging.
• Platform updates: View Transitions and the Navigation API have been standardized, and LoAF now allows measuring interaction performance across all browsers, including iOS. Chrome 148's declarative partial updates, streamHTML/streamHTMLUnsafe, and HTML-in-Canvas were also introduced.
• Built-in AI: Chrome 148's Prompt API supports multimodal input and structured JSON output, with expanded support for French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. Later, when combined with the Gemma model family and native function calling, this will enable client-side agent implementations.

The core message is that the web is shifting from a medium directly manipulated by humans to a medium where work is delegated to agents, and Chrome is pushing forward both the tools and the standards needed for this shift at the same time.