Beta Channel Arrives for Android Phones and Tablets

Starting today, you can install Chrome Beta channel for phones and tablets on Android 4.0+ from Google Play. This release includes some of the biggest developer updates to Chrome for Android since its launch last year, bringing many features available on other Chrome versions to Android as well:

• With prefixed support for CSS Filters you can apply visual effects like grayscale, blur, and contrast adjustment to the mobile web. Try this demo on Chrome for Android to see filters in action.
• The new Flexible Box Layout Module simplifies the styling of complex layouts.
• The dynamic viewport units vw, vh, and vmin can now be used for responsive design.
• The <track> element for video provides a simple, standardized way to add subtitles, captions, screen reader descriptions, and chapters. Note that it doesn’t work for fullscreen video on Chrome for Android yet.
• The CSS calc() function can be used anywhere a length is required by a CSS properties. It allows mathematical expressions with addition (‘+’), subtraction (‘-’), multiplication (‘*’), and division (‘/’) to be used as component values.
• The @sandbox and @srcdoc attributes of the <iframe> element give you more control over inline frames.
• Unprefixed IndexedDB gives you access to fast, structured client-side storage.
• Our technique to make desktop web pages more readable on mobile screens (now called Text Autosizing) has been improved and is more consistent with other browsers.
• V8 has been updated to 3.15 bringing a big speed boost; performance on the Octane benchmark improved on average by 25-30%.

Lastly, the new beta comes with an updated stack of Developer Tools. Expect big improvements in measuring your mobile performance with the Timeline's frames mode and easily navigate and edit your active scripts in the revised Sources panel.

You can report any issues you find within the app or at mcrbug.com/new. We’ll be pushing periodic updates so you can test out our latest work as soon as it’s ready. Even better, you can install the Beta alongside your current version of Chrome for Android

Posted by Peter Beverloo, Software Engineer and Mobile Web Maestro