Some few months after the launch of the GSamsung Galaxy Nexus, Google released the Chrome browser for the Android platform. Chrome for Android quickly became the stock browser for Android, bringing with it a number of important benefits to users – the main one of these being how Chrome for Android may be linked with a Gmail account, meaning your browser data can be shared across devices. Now, over the years the Chrome browser has evolved and been improved, although some might argue that along the way it has lost some of the original charm designed to keep it a simple, fast and fuss free web browser application. The latest version of Chrome, version 42, has been progressed by Google’s software engineers and today, we have the announcement of a new version, Chrome 43.
Google’s Chrome update blog cites three areas where the browser has been improved and the first concerns how quickly users can checkout using their Google Wallet account. It seems that the engineers have accelerated and streamlined the check out process via the Chrome browser, although there are no other specifics as to how this has been achieved. It does, however, tie in with the second area that Chrome 43 for Android has been improved: we have the ubiquitous “bug fixes and performance improvements” statement, which has been found on every software update to the Chrome browser released since the beginning. However, for Chrome 43 the blog post notes that there has been a “speedy performance improvement,” so perhaps Google have been reading out blog and have taken our criticism to heart? The final improvement is the adoption of Touch to Search” technology, whereby the customer can learn more about words and phrases by touching them on the device screen.
Chrome 43.0.2357.78 will be available as an update or fresh application from the Google Play Store over the next few days as Google roll the update out across the globe. However, it will require Android 4.1 Jelly Bean or higher because Google has dropped support for Android 4.0.x Ice Cream Sandwich. The reason for dropping support for Android Ice Cream Sandwich is because the older operating system does not support all of the APIs that Jelly Bean and later support, so required an increasingly number of workarounds to be built into the Chrome code, which made the application larger and took longer to develop and test.