Browsers are a core part of the mobile phone experience, but I don’t find them particularly exciting. I do with my browser largely what I did ten years ago: open it up, go to a URL, and scroll through the page that appears. I don’t really use bookmarks or search predictions, though combining the search and location bars together was pretty nice. Custom search engines are fun too.
I say this to convey my general apathy towards covering the updates that come to web browsers. But the latest beta version of Chrome comes with changes that even folks like me will have a hard time ignoring—things we’ve already highlighted before when they appeared in Chrome Dev, such as a snackbar that now appears at the bottom of the screen when you complete a download.
Left: The notification that previously served as the only marker a download was complete, Right: A delicious snackbar appears
Again, we also have support for the ‘theme-color’ attribute without merging tabs and apps. But in this release we see signs of progress. Now the notification bar also changes color.
Left: Before, Right: After
But we’re not here to just cover old ground. As Google highlights in a recent blog post, Chrome 47 beta gives web apps the ability to display splash screens when launched from the Android home screen. Developers can tweak the color and icon of the animation that appears, which disappears once the app has loaded and starts displaying things.
Moving on, cooperative multitasking with requestIdleCallback() in Chrome beta 47 should better help developers achieve a screen refresh rate of 60 frames per second.
I could continue, but the changes only get less stimulating for non-developer types from here. So here are the remaining updates, courtesy of Google.
The Play Store link is available below, but just in case, you can also find Chrome beta 47 on APK Mirror. Android System Webview 47 is also out too.
- Source:
- Chromium blog,
- Chrome Releases