Chrome 27 Beta Is Faster And Offers New HTML5 Forms
Google launched Chrome 27 on the Beta channel. This release introduces smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling and a few new features for web developers.
Google claims that web content now appears on screen 5% faster (on average) thanks to changes in Chrome's resource scheduler. Starting with this release, the scheduler is more aggressive about using an idle connection and demoting the priority of preloaded resources so that they don't interfere with critical assets. Google has also added Speed Index values from webpagetest.org to the list of metrics we use to measure improvements in page load time.
The month, week, and date input types now feature a simple user interface on desktop versions of Chrome.
Starting in today's Beta, you can use live audio as input to the Web Audio API for low-latency local audio manipulation and playback. When combined with the recent hook up of Web Audio and WebRTC PeerConnection, it enables analysis and manipulation of the input signal to WebRTC. For now this feature is only available on Mac and Windows.
The Sync FileSystem API is a new offline storage API for Chrome Packaged Apps which automatically synchronizes stored data across clients via Google Drive. The files are stored in private sandboxes and can be manipulated with the HTML5 File API and FileSystem API.
Dock-to-right supports vertical split view, and you can now right-click resources in the Network tab to "Copy as cURL". The network panel has been improved as well: you can now customize what columns are shown, including the new "domain" one. Finally, console messages can be filtered by source and impl-side painting events are properly displayed in the timeline.
Other web platform features in this release include:
- Unprefixed support for the allowfullscreen attribute for iframe allows embedded video players like the YouTube's to go fullscreen.
- The User-Agent field is now sent in WebSocket opening handshake headers.
- The ch CSS unit can be used to match the width and spacing of the "0"-glyph in the current font.
The month, week, and date input types now feature a simple user interface on desktop versions of Chrome.
Starting in today's Beta, you can use live audio as input to the Web Audio API for low-latency local audio manipulation and playback. When combined with the recent hook up of Web Audio and WebRTC PeerConnection, it enables analysis and manipulation of the input signal to WebRTC. For now this feature is only available on Mac and Windows.
The Sync FileSystem API is a new offline storage API for Chrome Packaged Apps which automatically synchronizes stored data across clients via Google Drive. The files are stored in private sandboxes and can be manipulated with the HTML5 File API and FileSystem API.
Dock-to-right supports vertical split view, and you can now right-click resources in the Network tab to "Copy as cURL". The network panel has been improved as well: you can now customize what columns are shown, including the new "domain" one. Finally, console messages can be filtered by source and impl-side painting events are properly displayed in the timeline.
Other web platform features in this release include:
- Unprefixed support for the allowfullscreen attribute for iframe allows embedded video players like the YouTube's to go fullscreen.
- The User-Agent field is now sent in WebSocket opening handshake headers.
- The ch CSS unit can be used to match the width and spacing of the "0"-glyph in the current font.
