Chrome 28 Beta: A more immersive web, everywhere
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Faster page loads
Starting in today’s Beta, your apps get a free speed boost from Blink’s new threaded HTML parser. It has two under-the-hood performance benefits: (1) reduced jankiness by moving work off the main JavaScript thread, and (2) improved page loading speed through pipelining. Compared to the normal HTML parser, it loads DOM content about 10% faster and reduces the maximum stop time due to parsing by 40%.
Experimental new media features in Chrome for Android
In today's Beta, Web Audio joins WebGL and WebRTC as an option in about:flags in Chrome for Android. Used together or independently, these three features will allow you to create rich, powerful web experiences that work across device form factors. We’re still actively improving the implementations, but we invite you to start experimenting. To see them in action, watch the mobile web demo in the Google I/O 2013 keynote.
Deprecated features
The prefixed version of the Content Security Policy HTTP header is now deprecated, so please use Content-Security-Policy instead of X-WebKit-CSP. The prefixed version will still work for now, but future releases may not support it.
For Chrome Extensions, HTML-based notifications have been deprecated in favor of the new Rich Notifications Chrome API. Extensions developers who are using HTML notifications in their apps or extensions should migrate to the newer Rich Notifications API, as support for the existing createHTMLNotification() feature will stop working in a future release of Chrome.
Other developer features in this release
- You can now use CSS @supports conditional blocks to test whether Chromium supports certain property:value pairs.
- The :unresolved CSS pseudoclass lets you style a Custom Element that hasn’t been registered in the browser yet. Custom Elements are part of Web Components.
- As part of V8's continuing quest to make all JavaScript as fast as possible, recent optimizations have made the asm.js benchmarks more than twice as fast as prior versions of Chrome.
- Chrome Apps and Extensions developers can now use rich notifications to proactively engage with users.
For general information about what’s going on in Chromium and Blink, watch the recordings of the fireside chats with the Blink team and the Chrome team at Google I/O 2013.
Posted by Alexandre Elias, Software Engineer and Screen Space Conservationist
