Web browsing is seen as “old” by some people. And many would rather just use an app instead of going to a website to do some browsing or even some purchasing. A big reason for this is passwords and logins. They can be a big hassle. Although many web browsers do have password management, it’s not super secure, and doesn’t work with every single site on the web. There are also password management apps like LastPass, EnPass and many others, which are much more secure, and work more widely than Chrome’s password management system. Now Google is looking to take steps to fix that and make a better browsing experience with the latest Chrome Beta update which brings it to version 51 on Android. Essentially what Google is doing is giving us a form of Smart Lock on Chrome.
This API was created by the W3C, and basically makes an universal way for the browser to communicate with websites to use the password manager. So the API isn’t about authentication at all, but better communication. Seeing as that is actually where the issue lies, that’s not a big surprise, and it’s actually really easy for web developers to implement this API into their site(s).
Another feature that comes to the beta version of Chrome on Android this time around comes in the form of making web pages smoother, and faster to load. Some websites are much slower than others, and Google is looking to speed it up by not loading videos, GIFs, animations, widgets, and stuff of that nature, until you actually see it on screen. So if you load up a website and there are widgets on the website, but you can’t see them, they aren’t going to load until you scroll down. What this means is that you’ll have a faster experience in Chrome, even on websites that are notoriously slow.
Of course there’s plenty more in this update to Chrome Beta, most of it is behind-the-scenes stuff, which you can all read about on the Chromium blog post which is linked below. You can pick up Chrome Beta from the Google Play Store right now.