In Chrome 40 we shipped Service Workers, enabling developers to make their sites load faster and work offline by intercepting network requests to deliver programmatic or cached responses. Until now, developers had to inspect their Service Worker’s cache manually by printing out its contents to the console, making debugging slow. Today’s Beta includes a new section in DevTools for viewing Service Worker caches which can be found by inspecting a Service Worker on chrome://serviceworker-internals.
Other updates in this release
ES6 Lexical Declarations cause variables declared with the 'let' keyword to be scoped to their containing block instead of being hoisted to the top of their containing function, giving developers more control over Javascript's tricky scoping rules.
The new CSS value image-rendering: pixelated allows scaled images to appear to be composed of very large pixels, trading smooth results for faster image scaling.
CSS Media Queries now support any-pointer and any-hover, which function similarly to pointer and hover but can be triggered by any input device, not only the primary one.
The Web Audio API now allows developers to temporarily suspend an AudioContext when it’s not in use, improving power consumption. StereoPannerNode is also now supported, enabling left-right panning of an incoming audio stream while maintaining equal power.
HTTPS sites that have certificate chains using SHA-1 that are valid past January 1st, 2017 will be treated as “affirmatively insecure” in Chrome UI from this release onwards as part of our plan to gradually sunset SHA-1.
Update February 13th: The new CSS values mix-blend-mode and isolation provide control over how an HTML or SVG element blends with the content behind it.
