The latest Chrome Beta channel release includes a slew of new developer features that make the web faster and safer for users. Unless otherwise noted, changes apply to desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome for Android.Read More

The latest Chrome Beta channel release includes a slew of new developer features that make the web faster and safer for users. Unless otherwise noted, changes apply to desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome for Android.

Animated WebP

The animated WebP image format offers some important improvements as an alternative to animated GIF, including true alpha channel (8-bit) as compared to a binary (1-bit) alpha in GIFs. Also, each frame can be lossy or lossless as needed. Compare the animated WebP version (372 KB) of the picture below to the animated GIF version (870 KB). The WebP version is 57% smaller.

300ms tap delay removal on Chrome for Android

Starting this release, responsive mobile websites will get a performance boost in Chrome for Android because we’ve disabled double-tap zoom. Previously, to support double-tap zoom, Chrome had to delay every touch event sent to the webpage by 300ms to allow the user to tap a second time. Now mobile-friendly sites that are already formatted to automatically fit in the page width will receive click events instantly and can respond to user input more quickly.

NPAPI plug-ins blocked by default

As we announced a few months ago, all but a handful of Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plug-ins will be blocked by default starting in today’s Beta. Check out the developer guide to learn more.

Vibration API

New in Chrome for Android, the Vibration API allows web developers to programmatically provide tactile feedback in the form of vibration. Use cases include improved accessibility and more engaging browser-based games.

Chrome Apps and Extensions APIs

• signedInDevices API allows you retrieve a list of the user’s signed-in devices.
• MediaGallery API now supports import of Picasa albums.
• The Identity API now provides events such as sign-in and sign-out.
• Websites in incognito tab can now connect to Apps with user consent.
• chrome.runtime API now optionally provides TLS channel ID to extensions or apps to allow for stronger security.

Visit chromestatus.com for a complete overview of Chrome’s developer features, and circle +Google Chrome Developers for more frequent updates.

Posted by Urvang Joshi, Software Engineer and Aspiring Animator

Four years ago we announced SPDY, an experimental protocol designed to make the web faster. It has matured quickly since then: it’s been adopted by Chrome, Opera, Firefox ...Read More

Four years ago we announced SPDY, an experimental protocol designed to make the web faster. It has matured quickly since then: it’s been adopted by Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer, dozens of server and middleware vendors, and many large sites. SPDY also became the foundation of the HTTP/2 protocol developed by the IETF, and is continuing to serve as an experimental ground for prototyping and testing new features for HTTP/2.

When we set out on this journey the objective was to make the web faster and we wanted to share our latest results. Of course, as with every aspect of performance, the numbers vary for each site, based on how it is constructed, the number of downloaded assets and dozens of other criteria. That said, we’ve observed significant performance improvements in latency—as measured by time from first request byte to onload event in the browser—across all of Google’s major web applications.

	Google News	Google Sites	Google Drive	Google Maps
Median	-43%	-27%	-23%	-24%
5th percentile (fast connections)	-32%	-30%	-15%	-20%
95th percentile (slow connections)	-44%	-33%	-36%	-28%

The above results were measured for Chrome version 29 and compare HTTPS vs. SPDY for each application across millions of real user sessions with various connectivity profiles. SPDY delivers significant latency savings for users with fast connections, at the median, and for the long tail users with high round-trip times.

In parallel with our contributions to the HTTP/2 standard, we continue to prototype further SPDY performance improvements through smarter compression, flow control, and prioritization. Our hope is that each of these will deliver better and faster SPDY and HTTP/2 protocols. We aren’t done yet—there are still many opportunities and ideas to explore to make the web faster!

Posted by Hasan Khalil, Roberto Peon, and Ilya Grigorik, SPeeDY Software Engineers

For the past few years, building multimedia web experiences for mobile devices has been difficult. Phones and tablets are less powerful than their counterparts, and mobile browsers have traditionally had limited API support. Despite these challenges, the mobile web is evolving rapidly. In the last few months alone, Chrome for Android gained support for ...Read More

For the past few years, building multimedia web experiences for mobile devices has been difficult. Phones and tablets are less powerful than their counterparts, and mobile browsers have traditionally had limited API support. Despite these challenges, the mobile web is evolving rapidly. In the last few months alone, Chrome for Android gained support for WebGL, WebRTC, and Web Audio.

“A Journey through Middle-Earth”, our latest Chrome Experiment, demonstrates what’s now possible on the mobile web. Developed by North Kingdom in collaboration with Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, the experiment uses the latest web technologies to deliver a multimedia experience designed specifically for tablets, phones, and touch-enabled desktops.

The experiment starts with an interactive map of Middle-earth. It may not feel like it, but this cinematic part of the experience was built with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. North Kingdom used the Touch Events API to support multi-touch pinch-to-zoom and the Full Screen API to allow users to hide the URL address bar. It looks natural on any screen size thanks to media queries and feels low-latency because of hardware-accelerated CSS Transitions.

Clicking or tapping a location in the map reveals a second layer with horizontal parallax scrolling, again built just with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Eventually users reach an immersive WebGL-based 3D environment optimized for Android phones and tablets with high-end GPUs. These environments also use the Web Audio API for interactive audio.

The multi-device web is evolving rapidly, and we’re looking forward to more sites like “A Journey Through Middle-earth” that show the potential of the platform’s latest mobile features. For a deeper technical case study, check out North Kingdom’s new HTML5 Rocks article about using WebGL in Chrome for Android. We’re also planning to host a Google Developers Live session with the team in early December; circle +Google Chrome Developers for details.

Posted by Max Heinritz, Product Manager and (Tolkien) Troll Evader

*Update: you can now read North Kingdom's second HTML5 Rocks case study on building the rest of the HTML5 front-end for "A Journey through Middle-earth".

Today we’re releasing the Dart SDK 1.0, a cross-browser, open source toolkit for structured web applications. In the two years since we first announced Dart, we’ve been working closely with early adopters to mature the project and grow the community. This release marks Dart's transition to a production-ready option for web developers.Read More

Today we’re releasing the Dart SDK 1.0, a cross-browser, open source toolkit for structured web applications. In the two years since we first announced Dart, we’ve been working closely with early adopters to mature the project and grow the community. This release marks Dart's transition to a production-ready option for web developers.

The Dart SDK 1.0 includes everything you need to write structured web applications: a simple yet powerful programming language, robust tools, and comprehensive core libraries. Together, these pieces can help make your development workflow simpler, faster, and more scalable as your projects grow from a few scripts to full-fledged web applications.

On the tools side, the SDK includes Dart Editor, a lightweight but powerful Dart development environment. We wanted to give developers the tools to manage a growing code base, so we added code completion, refactoring, jump to definition, a debugger, hints and warnings, and lots more. Dart also offers an instant edit/refresh cycle with Dartium, a custom version of Chromium with the native Dart VM. Outside the browser, the Dart VM can also be used for asynchronous server side computation.

For deployment, dart2js is a translator that allows your Dart code to run in modern browsers. The performance of generated JavaScript has improved dramatically since our initial release and is in many cases getting close to that of idiomatic JavaScript. In fact, the dart2js output of the DeltaBlue benchmark now runs even faster than idiomatic JavaScript. Similarly, dart2js output code size has been reduced substantially. The generated JavaScript for the game Pop, Pop, Win! is now 40% smaller than it was a year ago. Performance of the VM continues to improve as well; it’s now between 42% to 130% faster than idiomatic JavaScript running in V8, depending on the benchmark.

DeltaBlue benchmark results

The Dart SDK also features the Pub package manager, with more than 500 packages from the community. Fan favorites include AngularDart and polymer.dart, which provide higher-level frameworks for building web apps. Dart developers can continue using their favorite JavaScript libraries with Dart-JavaScript interop.

Going forward, the Dart team will focus on improving Dartium, increasing Dart performance, and ensuring the platform remains rock solid. In particular, changes to core technologies will be backward-compatible for the foreseeable future.

Today’s release marks the first time Dart is officially production-ready, and we’re seeing teams like Blossom, Montage, Soundtrap, Mandrill, Google's internal CRM app and Google Elections, already successfully using Dart in production. In addition, companies like Adobe, drone.io, and JetBrains have started to add Dart support to their products.

To get started, head over to dartlang.org and join the conversation at our Dartisans community on Google+. We’re excited to see what you will build with the new stable Dart SDK 1.0.

Posted by Lars Bak, Software Engineer and Chief Dartisan

Native Client (NaCl) brings the performance and low-level control of native code to modern web browsers, without sacrificing the security benefits and portability of web applications. By helping developers directly leverage the power of the underlying CPU and GPU, NaCl enables web applications from ...Read More

Native Client (NaCl) brings the performance and low-level control of native code to modern web browsers, without sacrificing the security benefits and portability of web applications. By helping developers directly leverage the power of the underlying CPU and GPU, NaCl enables web applications from photo editing and audio mixing, to 3D gaming and CAD modeling. Today, we’re launching Portable Native Client (PNaCl, pronounced pinnacle), which lets developers compile their code once to run on any hardware platform and embed their PNaCl application in any website.

Under the hood, PNaCl works by compiling native C and C++ code to an intermediate representation, rather than architecture-specific representations as in Native Client. The LLVM-style bytecode is wrapped into a portable executable, which can be hosted on a web server like any other website asset. When the site is accessed, Chrome fetches and translates the portable executable into an architecture-specific machine code optimized directly for the underlying device. This translation approach means developers don’t need to recompile their applications multiple times to run across x86, ARM or MIPS devices.

PNaCl unlocks the power of native performance for applications like Bullet physics simulators and Lua interpreters. For now PNaCl is Chrome only, but developers can make their PNaCl applications compatible with other browsers via pepper.js, which allows applications to use the Pepper API from JavaScript.

Portable Native Client provides a natively fast, secure option to meet the demands of a new generation of web applications. As always, we look forward to your questions and feedback on Stack Overflow or our discussion forum, and will host a Google Developers Live event on Thursday, November 14th to answer your questions. Visit gonacl.com for tutorials, documentation, and to get the SDK.

Posted by David Sehr, Summiting Engineer and Mountain Man

Developers of Chrome Apps and extensions have long been familiar with the developer-mode setting of the chrome://extensions tab in the Chrome browser. This tab provides shortcuts for loading unpacked apps and extensions, launching them, inspecting their pages, and more. Today, we are improving this experience by introducing the new ...Read More

Developers of Chrome Apps and extensions have long been familiar with the developer-mode setting of the chrome://extensions tab in the Chrome browser. This tab provides shortcuts for loading unpacked apps and extensions, launching them, inspecting their pages, and more. Today, we are improving this experience by introducing the new Chrome Apps Developer Tool, available now in the Chrome Web Store, which adds some great new features and works as a standalone Chrome App itself:

In addition to a much cleaner and easier-to-use layout, the new tool provides all of the same functionality as the chrome://extensions tab while streamlining the developer workflow:

• Apps and extensions are now listed in separate tabs, reducing the potential for developer confusion and reinforcing the difference between the two item types. This also reduces the size of each list, making it faster to scroll through.
• Unpacked items and installed items are now listed separately, which makes it much easier to quickly see and access your works-in-progress.
• You can individually update specific apps and extensions with one click, instead of having to update all items at once like in the old tab.
• The common actions for each item, such as reload, launch, view permissions, pack, and uninstall, are located right next to that item for fast access.
• The list can now be live-filtered using the Search box at the top right of the page instead of having to use the regular “Find in page” feature of Chrome.

If you’re developing Chrome Apps or extensions and you have at least the latest version of Chrome Beta installed, get the new tool today and send us your feedback on our G+ Developers page or our developer forum.

Posted by Viet Hoa Dinh, Software Engineer and Tooling Taskmaster

Extensions are a great way to enhance the browsing experience; whether users want to quickly post to social networks or to stay up to date with their favorite sports teams. Many services ...Read More

Extensions are a great way to enhance the browsing experience; whether users want to quickly post to social networks or to stay up to date with their favorite sports teams. Many services bundle useful companion extensions, which causes Chrome to ask whether you want to install them (or not). However, bad actors have abused this mechanism, bypassing the prompt to silently install malicious extensions that override browser settings and alter the user experience in undesired ways, such as replacing the New Tab Page without approval. In fact, this is a leading cause of complaints from our Windows users.

Since these malicious extensions are not hosted on the Chrome Web Store, it’s difficult to limit the damage they can cause to our users. As part of our continuing security efforts, we’re announcing a stronger measure to protect Windows users: starting in January on the Windows stable and beta channels, we’ll require all extensions to be hosted in the Chrome Web Store. We’ll continue to support local extension installs during development as well as installs via Enterprise policy, and Chrome Apps will also continue to be supported normally.

If your extensions are currently hosted outside the Chrome Web Store you should migrate them as soon as possible. There will be no impact to your users, who will still be able to use your extension as if nothing changed. You could keep the extensions hidden from the Web Store listings if you like. And if you have a dedicated installation flow from your own website, you can make use of the existing inline installs feature.

Protecting our users is a key priority, and we believe this change will help those whose browser has been compromised by unwanted extensions. If you have questions, please get in touch with us on the Chromium extensions group.

Erik Kay, Engineering Director

We created the Octane Benchmark Suite to measure how JavaScript engines perform on tasks that matter to users as well as motivate our own performance work on the V8 JavaScript engine. Today we’re releasing version 2.0 of the suite including a new focus on reducing latency, new benchmarks that target use cases like ...Read More

We created the Octane Benchmark Suite to measure how JavaScript engines perform on tasks that matter to users as well as motivate our own performance work on the V8 JavaScript engine. Today we’re releasing version 2.0 of the suite including a new focus on reducing latency, new benchmarks that target use cases like asm.js and updates to existing benchmarks.

Traditional benchmarks simply measure how quickly JavaScript can be executed. Octane 2.0 additionally measures latency, which is another important aspect of performance that is concerned with the smoothness of execution. In modern JavaScript engines like V8, latency comes from two main sources: compiling JavaScript to machine instructions so it can run faster, and garbage collecting memory that is no longer used. These tasks are computationally intensive and if they run for too long can be visible to users as small hiccups and freezes of JavaScript programs. We've added a modified version of our Mandreel and Splay benchmarks to measure how well JavaScript engines can minimize these pauses.

We’ve also added two new performance tests that target important use cases. One new test is based on the Typescript compiler from Microsoft, a heavy and complex JavaScript application. Its execution stresses raw execution speed, code parsing and the memory subsystem. We've also included the zlib benchmark, an asm.js test from the Mozilla Emscripten suite. Both new benchmarks help measure an engine’s ability to deal with heavy and complex workloads, which are increasingly common in today's web applications.

Finally, we fixed three existing benchmarks to help ensure that they measure what they were intended to:

• Regexp: verify that regexp calculations give the correct results.
• GameBoy Emulator: code that was supposed to run in strict mode now actually runs in strict mode.
• CodeLoad: make sure the code loaded is different on every iteration.

Octane 2.0 represents one more step in our continuing quest to deliver the best possible performance for users. You can run Octane 2.0 in your browser or read the documentation for an in-depth look at the new benchmarks.

Posted by Hannes Payer, Software Engineer and Latency Buster

The Android 4.4, KitKat release contains a new WebView implementation built on Chromium open source technology.

The Chromium WebView is a complete overhaul of the Android WebView API. It means that the same rendering engine and software stack that powers Chrome is available for use by app developers targeting Android 4.4 KitKat, helping power games, social networks, news and blog readers, in-app ads, and of course complete web browsers. With it comes support for the latest HTML5 and CSS features and a dramatic upgrade of V8 for top-end JavaScript performance.Read More

The Android 4.4, KitKat release contains a new WebView implementation built on Chromium open source technology.

The Chromium WebView is a complete overhaul of the Android WebView API. It means that the same rendering engine and software stack that powers Chrome is available for use by app developers targeting Android 4.4 KitKat, helping power games, social networks, news and blog readers, in-app ads, and of course complete web browsers. With it comes support for the latest HTML5 and CSS features and a dramatic upgrade of V8 for top-end JavaScript performance.

Chromium WebView is present on all devices running Android 4.4 and applications using WebView will transition to it automatically, no user intervention required. We’ve aimed to make the transition simple for developers too, while also paving the way to increased open web standards convergence. Most applications will continue to function unaltered, and we've prepared an Android 4.4 WebView migration guide to walk developers through the important changes.

With DevTools remote debugging support for WebView, developing and analyzing web content inside native Android applications is as easy as debugging a web page on desktop Chrome, offering a productivity boost to developers.

Best of all, it’s entirely open source, and is available in the Android 4.4 KitKat AOSP release built on a snapshot of the latest stable Chromium source tree. We're looking forward to working with the broader Chromium community to continue improving WebView. Watch dev.chromium.org/developers and the chromium-dev mailing list for future updates on getting involved in the Chromium WebView development. In the meantime, you can check out the Chromium WebView FAQ.

Happy developing from all of the Chromium WebView team!

Posted by Jonathan Dixon and Ben Murdoch, Ambassadors of Chocolate Treats