Starting this release, responsive mobile websites will get a performance boost in Chrome for Android because we’ve disabled double-tap zoom. Previously, to support double-tap zoom, Chrome had to delay every touch event sent to the webpage by 300ms to allow the user to tap a second time. Now mobile-friendly sites that are already formatted to automatically fit in the page width will receive click events instantly and can respond to user input more quickly.
New in Chrome for Android, the Vibration API allows web developers to programmatically provide tactile feedback in the form of vibration. Use cases include improved accessibility and more engaging browser-based games.
Chrome Apps and Extensions APIs
signedInDevices API allows you retrieve a list of the user’s signed-in devices.
The above results were measured for Chrome version 29 and compare HTTPS vs. SPDY for each application across millions of real user sessions with various connectivity profiles. SPDY delivers significant latency savings for users with fast connections, at the median, and for the long tail users with high round-trip times.
In parallel with our contributions to the HTTP/2 standard, we continue to prototype further SPDY performance improvements through smarter compression, flow control, and prioritization. Our hope is that each of these will deliver better and faster SPDY and HTTP/2 protocols. We aren’t done yet—there are still many opportunities and ideas to explore to make the web faster!
Posted by Hasan Khalil, Roberto Peon, and Ilya Grigorik, SPeeDY Software Engineers
The experiment starts with an interactive map of Middle-earth. It may not feel like it, but this cinematic part of the experience was built with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. North Kingdom used the Touch Events API to support multi-touch pinch-to-zoom and the Full Screen API to allow users to hide the URL address bar. It looks natural on any screen size thanks to media queries and feels low-latency because of hardware-accelerated CSS Transitions.
Clicking or tapping a location in the map reveals a second layer with horizontal parallax scrolling, again built just with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Eventually users reach an immersive WebGL-based 3D environment optimized for Android phones and tablets with high-end GPUs. These environments also use the Web Audio API for interactive audio.
The multi-device web is evolving rapidly, and we’re looking forward to more sites like “A Journey Through Middle-earth” that show the potential of the platform’s latest mobile features. For a deeper technical case study, check out North Kingdom’s new HTML5 Rocks article about using WebGL in Chrome for Android. We’re also planning to host a Google Developers Live session with the team in early December; circle +Google Chrome Developers for details.
Posted by Max Heinritz, Product Manager and (Tolkien) Troll Evader
Today we’re releasing the Dart SDK 1.0, a cross-browser, open source toolkit for structured web applications. In the two years since we first announced Dart, we’ve been working closely with early adopters to mature the project and grow the community. This release marks Dart's transition to a production-ready option for web developers.
The Dart SDK 1.0 includes everything you need to write structured web applications: a simple yet powerful programming language, robust tools, and comprehensive core libraries. Together, these pieces can help make your development workflow simpler, faster, and more scalable as your projects grow from a few scripts to full-fledged web applications.
On the tools side, the SDK includes Dart Editor, a lightweight but powerful Dart development environment. We wanted to give developers the tools to manage a growing code base, so we added code completion, refactoring, jump to definition, a debugger, hints and warnings, and lots more. Dart also offers an instant edit/refresh cycle with Dartium, a custom version of Chromium with the native Dart VM. Outside the browser, the Dart VM can also be used for asynchronous server side computation.
For deployment, dart2js is a translator that allows your Dart code to run in modern browsers. The performance of generated JavaScript has improved dramatically since our initial release and is in many cases getting close to that of idiomatic JavaScript. In fact, the dart2js output of the DeltaBlue benchmark now runs even faster than idiomatic JavaScript. Similarly, dart2js output code size has been reduced substantially. The generated JavaScript for the game Pop, Pop, Win! is now 40% smaller than it was a year ago. Performance of the VM continues to improve as well; it’s now between 42% to 130% faster than idiomatic JavaScript running in V8, depending on the benchmark.
DeltaBlue benchmark results
The Dart SDK also features the Pub package manager, with more than 500 packages from the community. Fan favorites include AngularDart and polymer.dart, which provide higher-level frameworks for building web apps. Dart developers can continue using their favorite JavaScript libraries with Dart-JavaScript interop.
Going forward, the Dart team will focus on improving Dartium, increasing Dart performance, and ensuring the platform remains rock solid. In particular, changes to core technologies will be backward-compatible for the foreseeable future.
Today’s release marks the first time Dart is officially production-ready, and we’re seeing teams like Blossom, Montage, Soundtrap, Mandrill, Google's internal CRM app and Google Elections, already successfully using Dart in production. In addition, companies like Adobe, drone.io, and JetBrains have started to add Dart support to their products.
PNaCl unlocks the power of native performance for applications like Bullet physics simulators and Lua interpreters. For now PNaCl is Chrome only, but developers can make their PNaCl applications compatible with other browsers via pepper.js, which allows applications to use the Pepper API from JavaScript.
Portable Native Client provides a natively fast, secure option to meet the demands of a new generation of web applications. As always, we look forward to your questions and feedback on Stack Overflow or our discussion forum, and will host a Google Developers Live event on Thursday, November 14th to answer your questions. Visit gonacl.com for tutorials, documentation, and to get the SDK.
Posted by David Sehr, Summiting Engineer and Mountain Man
In addition to a much cleaner and easier-to-use layout, the new tool provides all of the same functionality as the chrome://extensions tab while streamlining the developer workflow:
Apps and extensions are now listed in separate tabs, reducing the potential for developer confusion and reinforcing the difference between the two item types. This also reduces the size of each list, making it faster to scroll through.
Unpacked items and installed items are now listed separately, which makes it much easier to quickly see and access your works-in-progress.
You can individually update specific apps and extensions with one click, instead of having to update all items at once like in the old tab.
The common actions for each item, such as reload, launch, view permissions, pack, and uninstall, are located right next to that item for fast access.
The list can now be live-filtered using the Search box at the top right of the page instead of having to use the regular “Find in page” feature of Chrome.
If you’re developing Chrome Apps or extensions and you have at least the latest version of Chrome Beta installed, get the new tool today and send us your feedback on our G+ Developers page or our developer forum.
Posted by Viet Hoa Dinh, Software Engineer and Tooling Taskmaster
Traditional benchmarks simply measure how quickly JavaScript can be executed. Octane 2.0 additionally measures latency, which is another important aspect of performance that is concerned with the smoothness of execution. In modern JavaScript engines like V8, latency comes from two main sources: compiling JavaScript to machine instructions so it can run faster, and garbage collecting memory that is no longer used. These tasks are computationally intensive and if they run for too long can be visible to users as small hiccups and freezes of JavaScript programs. We've added a modified version of our Mandreel and Splay benchmarks to measure how well JavaScript engines can minimize these pauses.
We’ve also added two new performance tests that target important use cases. One new test is based on the Typescript compiler from Microsoft, a heavy and complex JavaScript application. Its execution stresses raw execution speed, code parsing and the memory subsystem. We've also included the zlib benchmark, an asm.js test from the Mozilla Emscripten suite. Both new benchmarks help measure an engine’s ability to deal with heavy and complex workloads, which are increasingly common in today's web applications.
Finally, we fixed three existing benchmarks to help ensure that they measure what they were intended to:
Regexp: verify that regexp calculations give the correct results.
GameBoy Emulator: code that was supposed to run in strict mode now actually runs in strict mode.
CodeLoad: make sure the code loaded is different on every iteration.
Octane 2.0 represents one more step in our continuing quest to deliver the best possible performance for users. You can run Octane 2.0 in your browser or read the documentation for an in-depth look at the new benchmarks.
Posted by Hannes Payer, Software Engineer and Latency Buster
Best of all, it’s entirely open source, and is available in the Android 4.4 KitKat AOSP release built on a snapshot of the latest stable Chromium source tree. We're looking forward to working with the broader Chromium community to continue improving WebView. Watch dev.chromium.org/developers and the chromium-dev mailing list for future updates on getting involved in the Chromium WebView development. In the meantime, you can check out the Chromium WebView FAQ.
Happy developing from all of the Chromium WebView team!
Posted by Jonathan Dixon and Ben Murdoch, Ambassadors of Chocolate Treats
.png)
