Chrome 148 lands name-only container queries — you can finally drop the container-type line
Container queries are one of the best things to happen to component CSS in years, but they've always shipped with a small papercut: to query a container by name, you also had to declare a container-type on it, or the query silently did nothing. Chrome 148, which reached stable on May 5, removes that requirement — and with it, name-only container queries become Baseline Newly available.
The papercut, and the fix
Previously, an @container rule that referenced a name needed a matching container-type declared somewhere on the container, even when you weren't doing a size query. Forget that line and the query just didn't apply — a quiet failure that cost plenty of people a debugging session. As of Chrome 148, a container can be matched on its container-name alone:
No container-type needed. It's a small change, but it's the kind that removes a recurring "why isn't this working" moment from the language. For anyone leaning on style queries or name-scoped containers in a design system, it's a welcome cleanup.
The rest of Chrome 148, briefly
Name-only container queries weren't the only thing in the release. Chrome 148 also added loading="lazy" support to <video> and <audio> elements, deferring media loads until they're near the viewport the same way images already do — a real performance lever for media-heavy pages. The at-rule() function in @supports lets you feature-detect at-rule support, and text-decoration-skip-ink: all arrived for finer control over underlines, including across CJK glyphs. On the AI side, the same release is where the Prompt API for on-device Gemini Nano went stable.
Should you change anything today?
If you already declare container-type on your containers, nothing breaks — your existing CSS keeps working exactly as before. The benefit is forward-looking: new name-scoped containers no longer need the extra line, and the failure mode where a missing type silently kills a query goes away. As always with a freshly Baseline feature, confirm your audience's browser mix before relying on it without a fallback, but the friction this removes is the everyday kind that adds up across a large codebase.