These early results are encouraging but we’re still turning dials under the hood. While we work we’ll be expanding to a small set of people using the stable channel of Chrome on Windows, Mac and Chromebooks, who have Google set as default search engine. As this experimental feature includes open APIs, any search engine may integrate with the new ‘new tab’ page in Chrome. Keep the feedback coming.
This release introduces the device motion part of the Device Orientation API in Chrome for Android Beta. DeviceMotion events provide you information about device acceleration and rotation rates. Check out isthisanearthquake.com to see them in action.
Media Source Extension in Chrome for Android
The MediaSource API allows JavaScript to generate media streams for playback, which enables use cases such as adaptive streaming and time-shifting live streams. It is now enabled by default in Chrome for Android running on Jellybean or higher. This API is especially useful for streaming to mobile devices, where connectivity is often constrained and unpredictable. Play with it on this demo page.
Unless otherwise noted, the changes described below apply to desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome for Android:
Support for the WebRTC Device Enumeration API allows users to change their microphones and/or camera on the fly without having to restart the WebRTC call.
DevTools now supports CSS source maps (also known as preprocessors).
Chrome will now match the behavior of IE and not honor the Refresh header or tags when the URL to be refreshed to has a javascript: scheme. This is done to close down one more XSS vector against poorly constructed sites.
Two new experimental features landed behind a flag on Chrome for Android: Web Speech API (recognition) and the Vibration API.
The Sketchbot The Sketchbot was an electronic arm that received over 5,000 commands per second to etch an outline of your face in the sand. The Open Source project includes the code and the hardware designs to build a replica of the Web Lab. For developers like me who are soldering iron challenged, we have also included instructions and code to build a BergCloud LittlePrinter and a pure software only version.
If you’ve got the maker itch and want to build a Web Lab replica, integrate hardware that we had never envisaged, or are just curious about how we made the Web Lab, you can grab the code from Github.
Be sure to share what you do with the code in our G+ Community.
Paul Kinlan - Chrome Developer Advocate, Open Sourcerer and Wannabe Maker.
The dashboard is designed to encourage transparency and to consolidate web platform feature tracking. For each feature, it shows useful details such as:
A short description and owner email address
Implementation status in Chromium
Progress through the standards process
Our understanding of the opinion of other browser vendors
Values are associated with a shade of red, yellow, or green based on how they affect the likelihood that a feature will ship in other browsers. For example, the entry for CSS Flexbox is entirely green, indicating that the spec is stable and publicly endorsed by other browser vendors. In general, we like to see a lot of green because it indicates that we’re minimizing compatibility risk and preserving the interoperability that makes the web platform so powerful.
This is the first iteration of the new version, and we plan to explore different ways of exposing the data, including a better aggregate view. If you’re curious, the code is available on Github. We used a new framework called Polymer, which is built on the emerging Web Components standards. Although Polymer is in early development, we decided this was a perfect place to experiment with it.
Members of a given group can add, edit, and otherwise work with the store items and overall account-related properties that the particular group has responsibility for.
With the new Group Publishing capability, an organization’s engineering, marketing and product management teams can now collaborate much more effectively to better manage their Chrome Web Store presence. Have questions about this or any other Chrome Web Store Feature? We always welcome your feedback on our G+ Developers page or our developer forum.
Wei Zheng, Software Engineer and Google Group Maestro
CSS preprocessors like Sass make it easier to organize your CSS, but until now tweaking your styles required switching to another program and refreshing Chrome. CSS preprocessor mapping enables live-editing of these sources directly within the Sources panel. To see it in action, just map the .scss file, then Ctrl-click on a property or value to jump to the variable, mixin or function that defined it. Support for other pre-processors such as Less, Stylus and Compass is in the works. Refer to the improved DevTools css-preprocessor documentation for more details and setup instructions.
Snippets
There are times when you want to be able to save smaller scripts, bookmarklets and utilities so that you always have them available while debugging in the browser. Snippets is a new DevTools feature that makes it possible. It allows you to create, store and run JavaScript within the Sources tab. It gives you a multi-line console with syntax-highlight and persistence, making it convenient for prototyping code that is more than a one-liner. There's also a community-curated repository of snippets for developers that contains useful snippets such as color pickers, CSS prettyfiers, logging helpers and much more.
