Chrome 81 brings NFC to mobile web apps

Phones with support for NFC (Near Field Communication) can use the technology to quickly pair with headphones or other accessories, make mobile payments at stores, or scan employee or conference attendee badges among other things.

Now you can do some of those things without installing an app — Google has announced that Chrome 81 beta brings support for web NFC to mobile devices.

In other words, web apps can utilize the NFC hardware in your smartphone — although it’s up to developers to actually create web apps that take advantage of the new tools.

Other changes in Chrome 81 are also designed to make web apps work more like native apps. For exampled, there are new features that improve upon the WebXR API for web apps that offer augmented reality experiences, improved support for form controls so that Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS web apps offer improved touch support and accessibility, and support for tracking position state during media playback (so you can see a slider in the notification tray, for example).

You can find out more about new features in Chrome 81 beta in Google’s blog post.