Google released Chrome 155 Beta on September 16, 2026, shipping several CSS improvements that web designers and frontend developers have been waiting for. The standout additions are the symbols() function for inline counter styles and the new corner shorthand that combines border-radius and corner-shape in a single declaration.
CSS symbols() — Inline Counter Styles
Until now, defining a custom list style required a standalone @counter-style rule. Chrome 155 Beta ships the symbols() function, which lets you define a counter style inline directly on the list-style property — no extra rule needed.
@counter-style thumbs {
system: cyclic;
symbols: "👍" "👎";
suffix: " ";
}
ol { list-style: thumbs; }
/* After: define it right where you use it */
ol { list-style: symbols(cyclic "👍" "👎"); }
The function supports all counter system types — cyclic, numeric, alphabetic, symbolic, and fixed. For design systems that generate unique one-off list styles for specific components, this removes the overhead of a global @counter-style declaration that lives far from the component consuming it.
CSS corner Shorthand
The corner shorthand property consolidates border-radius and corner-shape into a single declaration. Per-corner sub-shorthands such as corner-top-left work across both physical and logical edges.
.card {
corner-top-left: 12px notch;
corner-bottom-right: 8px scoop;
}
The corner-shape property allows corners to be notched, scooped, or angled rather than simply rounded. The new shorthand makes it practical without verbose multi-property declarations — useful when building component libraries that expose corner customisation as a design token.
text-decoration-skip-spaces
A smaller but welcome addition: text-decoration-skip-spaces controls whether underlines and other text decorations skip over whitespace characters. The default browser behaviour — where underlines draw a continuous line through spaces between words — has long been a visual nuisance for decorative link styles. Setting text-decoration-skip-spaces: all produces cleaner typography without a custom underline built from gradients or pseudo-elements.
JPEG XL and Platform APIs
Chrome 155 Beta also enables decoding of JPEG XL images, including progressive decoding and HDR capabilities. For web designers working with high-fidelity imagery, JPEG XL typically achieves better compression at equivalent quality compared to WebP, with richer colour gamut support. On the platform side, the release adds maximize(), minimize(), and restore() methods to the Window Management API, and introduces post-quantum cryptography algorithms (ML-KEM, ML-DSA) to WebCrypto.
Chrome 155 Beta is available now; stable release typically follows about six weeks later. The full changelog is on the Chrome Developers blog.