Changes are always moving down the line when it comes the Chromium project and its Google-branded Chrome brethren, from the canary option where users can practically use features as coders write them, all the way to the stable release, suited for the general public. With Chrome 54 having hit the stable channel not too long ago, Chrome 55 is now in the beta channel, nearly ready for primetime. The newest version of Chrome Beta, available now for desktop and mobile users, brings a huge number of under the hood improvements that should help web developers immensely. There are tons of changes here, but they don’t really concern end users right now, for the most part. Users will notice a much more pronounced difference in the coming weeks and months as more and more of these tweaks are implemented into the websites that they visit.
One of the biggest changes that users will notice in the near future is improved handling of touch and mouse events by rolling out a unified solution. Rather than sites having to keep track of touch and mouse events separately, they can implement this new unified event to have websites react to clicks and touches the same way. Web developers will find that promise-based Javascript is now much easier due to support for the async and await Java functions, allowing for much easier handling of dependency chains. CSS text can now automatically hyphenate at the end of a page, as well.
On the more developer-intensive side of things, a new audio behavior now requires iframes on mobile to get a gesture of play consent, such as a tap, from the user before playing audio. A number of other audio behavior tweaks are on board. The Web Share API is available on an experimental basis, there are new TLS tweaks, non-script MIME types no longer cause the browser to try and execute a script, and some deep-level text and rendering tweaks round things out for developers on the deep end. There are, however, a few changes that users will definitely notice. For starters, certain injected scripts will no longer load over 2G connections. Chrome’s built-in media player has a few tweaks, as well. It will now add an overlay control menu if the content window is not wide enough to fit all the controls, and playing back files that can be downloaded will show a download button. One of the biggest changes in this group is support for persistent web storage, a flag that developers can add to keep Chrome from automatically purging a site’s cache on a user device.