Chrome 34 has been released and Chrome 35 is available in beta. What do these new releases have on offer for devs?
The three key features of Chrome 34 are:
Responsive Images Using the new “srcset” attribute, Web developers can provide multiple resources in varying resolutions for a single image and the browser will picks one that matches the device’s capabilities, whether it’s a desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, or a TV. This should speed up page load times, reduce wasted bandwidth, and avoid improperly formatted content.
Unprefixed Web Audio Introducing an unprefixed version of the Web Audio API brings Chrome’s implementation of Web Audio in alignment with the W3C draft specification. Developers are asked to switch to the unprefixed versions as the prefixed versions have been deprecated and will be removed completely in a future release.
Import Supervised Users First added as a beta feature in Chrome 32, this allows you to imported supervised users come with all their permissions, which will automatically sync across devices.
New features of Chrome 35, applicable to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS, are intended to help devs:
make richer, more compelling web content and apps, especially for mobile devices.
More developer control over touch and zoom input The touch-action CSS property provides a mechanism to selectively disable touch scrolling, pinch-zooming, or double-tap-zooming on web content. This is a prerequisite for future optimizations that will enable scrolling and zooming that never block on the main thread.
In addition, web content on desktop computers will now receive mouse scroll wheel events with the ctrlKey modifier set so that sites that want to do something more appropriate for the user than trigger browser zoom can do so. For example, it means that when a user holds control and scrolls over a map in Google Maps, they will be able to zoom in on the map rather than invoke browser zoom to zoom the page.
New JavaScript functionality Support is included for a number of new JavaScript features defined in the ECMAScript 6 standard:
Promises - for referring to values that may not yet be known leading to cleaner asynchronous code
- for creating garbage-collected data structures to avoid memory leaks.
Object.observe - allows you to receive all changes to multiple objects in a single asynchronous call. This is especially useful for framework authors implementing data-binding.
Unprefixed Shadow DOM Shadow DOM is a new API primitive that brings reliable composition of user interface elements to the web platform and allow developers to scope their HTML markup, CSS, hiding the implementation details of complex components and build their own first-class elements and APIs.
According to Rick Byers, writing on the Chromium blog:
With Shadow DOM, web frameworks can stop worrying about their widgets inadvertently breaking pages by using conflicting CSS selectors, class or id names, and start relying on DOM as the interoperable way of building components.
Another new features in this release isCSS Font Loading which can be used to dynamically load font resources and gives developers more control over the user experience on pages that use Web Fonts. For instance, you can ask Chrome to start downloading the web fonts you'll need on demand and be notified when they become available.
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