In late 2018, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 10’s Edge will become a Chromium-based browser and the current version of Edge will be replaced in a future release. For users, this means that the development of Edge browser will advance faster than before and Microsoft’s active contribution to Chromium will also make other browsers (Chrome) work better on Windows devices.
Recently, we reported that Microsoft is actively contributing to the Chromium browser and the company is planning to improve the accessibility features of the Chromium-based browsers.
As the launch of Edge browser is nearing, Microsoft is contributing features back to the open-source implementation of Chromium.
In October 2018, a bug post suggested that Google should support custom styles for text captions on video and respect the system settings of Windows.
In January 2019, Google announced in a Chromium post that it plans to introduce CaptionStyle to customize the appearance of the captions/texts displayed during a video. Google had noted that Mac and Windows will use NativeTheme::GetSystemCaptionStyle() to fetch the system settings.
Today, we spotted a Chromium commit by Microsoft engineer which aims to allow Chromium-browsers to respect Windows 10’s system styling for captions in videos.
The Chromium post is titled ‘Add support for Windows system styling for captions’ and it is supposed to make the following changes:
- Add 4 new properties to CaptionStyle.
- Adds a WindowsCaptionStyle class that extends CaptionStyle and adds Windows support for webvtt caption styling.
- Adds command line flag ‘–enable-windows-caption-style’ which is needed to run platform specific code.
The post also notes that this commit follows the guidelines outlined by Google in January 2019. Microsoft, Google and contributors are also working to add support for background opacity, window opacity, and window colour.
By the looks of things, the change is basically supposed to add support for Windows 10’s custom styles for text captions in videos. In future, you can expect the captions and the other texts displayed within the video window to deliver a more native feel on Windows 10.
