Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Mac, and Windows.
CSS Grid Layout
Sites are increasingly being accessed on screens of all sizes, from large LCD TVs to tiny watch faces. Historically, supporting all of these screen sizes required complex combinations of markup and CSS, making code hard to maintain. To give developers more granular control over how elements grow and shrink to fit the current screen size, CSS Grid Layout is now available .
CSS Grid supports a two-dimensional grid-based layout system, optimized for responsive user interface design. Elements within the grid can be specified to span multiple columns or rows. Elements positioned in a CSS grid can also be named, making layout code easier to understand.
CSS Grid allows developers to arbitrarily place elements on a grid with full control over element flow, sizing behavior and responsiveness.
Improved Add to Home screen
Update (2017/03/09): Improved Add to Home screen is now planned to launch in Chrome 58.
Since early versions of Chrome for Android, users have been able to add sites to their Home screen for fast and convenient access. This feature adds the icons using Android shortcuts , which means that web apps don’t show up throughout Android in the same way as installed native apps.
In this release, when a user adds a Progressive Web App to their Home screen, Chrome will integrate it into Android in a much deeper way . For example, Progressive Web Apps will now appear in the app drawer section of the launcher and in Android Settings, and will be able to receive incoming intents from other apps. Long presses on their notifications will also reveal the normal Android notification management controls rather than the notification management controls for Chrome.
Media Session API
Media consumption is one of the most common uses for the mobile web. In Chrome for Android, developers can customize the lock screen UI and notifications with media content using the new Media Session API . By providing metadata to the browser about the content being played, developers can create rich lock screen messaging that includes information such as title, artist, album name, and artwork. Additionally , the site is now able to respond to user actions taken on the notification itself, such as seeking or skipping.
Other features in this release
The WebAssembly API has been enabled by default, allowing developers to run near-native code in the browser without a plugin.
When a video enters fullscreen on an Android device, Chrome now automatically locks the screen orientation according to the aspect ratio of the video.
Sites using continuous setTimeout() will now be throttled when using loops to drive out-of-view frame animations, improving performance for users.
The new padStart and padEnd formatting tools enable text padding , facilitating tasks like aligning console output or printing numbers with a fixed number of digits.
Service Worker Navigation Preload is now available as an Origin Trial, allowing developers to parallelize the network request for the main resource alongside service worker startup.
The Payment Request API can be made available inside an iframe by adding the allowpaymentrequest attribute.
PaymentMethodData now supports basic-card , so developers can refer to all card types with a single method identifier, rather than individual data types.
To simplify the migration from HTTP to HTTPS, stored credentials for HTTP forms are now transferred to the HTTPS version of the site, and the Credential Management API now supports filling credentials from matching subdomains.
The caret-color property enables developers to specify the color of the text input cursor.
Support is now available for text-decoration-skip: ink to make underlines skip descenders , the portion of letters that extend below the text's baseline.
New text-decoration properties are now available, allowing developers to specify visual effects such as line color and style.
The PresentationRequest constructor has been modified to accept multiple URLs via a sequence< DOMString > , in addition to the existing constructor that takes a single URL.
AudioBufferSourceNode , OscillatorNode , and ConstantSourceNode now inherit from AudioScheduledSourceNode , consolidating functionality.
The new cancelAndHoldAtTime function cancels future AudioParam events with times greater than or equal to cancelTime , allowing developers to preserve the value of the scheduled time in a direct way.
To increase user security, Chrome's XSS Auditor now blocks entire suspicious pages by default, rather than selectively filtering out the suspected reflected XSS on the page.
Deprecations and interoperability improvements
Support for the <keygen> element has been removed, causing it to no longer display any controls nor submit form element data , to align with other browsers.
Posted by Xi Han, Home Screen Heroine
