More new features are being tested in the newest beta release of Google Chrome which is the Chrome 60 Beta. These new features include the Paint Timing API, CSS font-display, and improvements in the Credential Management API. The first feature, Paint Timing API, provides web developers two new metrics on measuring how fast a web app or a web page loads. These two metrics are the First Paint and First Contentful Paint metrics, which both measure how fast the content renders on the screen after the user navigates to the site. However, the First Paint metric only marks the point wherein anything is loaded on the display. In contrast, the First Contentful Paint metric measures the point wherein useful content is loaded on the screen. For example, a point where the Google search field appears on the screen and a point where colors and pixels are rendered on the display.
Another new feature is the support for CSS font-display. This feature is useful when the Chrome browser has to download a font that appears on a certain website. Currently for the stable version, the Chrome browser will delay rendering the text until the font had been downloaded, which considerably slows down the rendering process. Now, Chrome allows the web page developers to use a certain set of font face descriptors to dictate how Chrome will temporarily render the text while the font is being downloaded.
Last but not the least is the usability improvement of the Credential Management API. Now, developers no longer need to use the fetch API and make a custom fetch in order to access the browser’s stored passwords. Instead, web pages may now retrieve the stored passwords using the API itself. This ultimately reduces the complexity of building web pages that require the retrieval of stored passwords. In addition, there were some modifications made to the API that will make Google’s API offerings more compatible with the efforts currently being done by the Web Authentication Working Group. These new features included in the Chrome Beta 60 are being developed in addition to the previously announced features like the new file picker and the revised API to prevent ads from vibrating the device.