The removal process will take place over the next several months. Beginning in a few weeks, Chrome will no longer enable the launcher when users first install a Chrome app. Anyone who currently has the launcher will receive a notice informing them that the launcher will be going away. In July, existing instances of the launcher will be removed.
Chrome apps can still be accessed by clicking the apps shortcut in the bookmarks bar or typing chrome://apps in the omnibox. Learn more about opening Chrome apps by visiting the help center.
Push notification improvements Push notifications allow a site to trigger system-level notifications in the same way that native applications do. The initial version of push notifications relied on service workers to proactively fetch the information for a notification from the server. This led to problems when there were multiple messages in flight or when the device was on a flaky network connection. The latest version of Chrome allows sites to include notification data payloads with their push messages to eliminate the final server check. To protect user privacy, push notification payloads must be encrypted. Push notification payloads are part of the Push API spec and already supported in Firefox.
In addition to payloads, sites can now detect when a notification is closed by the user, enabling better analytics and allowing cross-device notification dismissal. Sites can also control the look of notifications more finely, setting custom timestamps and icons for notification actions. When updating a notification, sites can specify whether the device should alert the user with sound or vibration, or remain silent.
In Chrome 50, notification actions support custom icons.
Absolute device orientation can be accessed via AbsoluteDeviceOrientation while DeviceOrientation now returns relative values that don’t use the magnetometer, preventing drift caused by nearby metallic objects when tracking head motion in VR.
Developers can now use the ES2015 Unicode regex flag u, as well as the regex well-known symbols@@match, @@replace, @@search, and @@split, for better control over regular expression matching.
Presentation connections can be managed more robustly with PresentationConnectionCloseEvent and PresentationConnectionCloseReason instead of the deprecated PresentationConnection.onStateChange.
Parameter automation of Web AudioBiquadFilter nodes is now evaluated every sample frame, rather than once every 128 frames, making resonant filter sweeps smoother.
