Chrome 28 Beta gets faster, brings fullscreen mode to Android

Google has released a beta version of Chrome 28 that introduces a number of new developer features and performance improvements. The increased page rendering speed is, Google says, due to a new threaded HTML parser that is part of its WebKit fork Blink. The company claims the new parser improves page loading times by ten per cent, mostly through pipelining DOM content. The parser also has to stop less during parsing which also reduces load time.

The new developer features include the introduction of a Fullscreen API in the Android version of the browser. The API allows web application developers to hide the browser's user interface and Android's status bar. Similar to the desktop version of Chrome, developers can specify that the browser should display pages in fullscreen mode by calling the webkitRequestFullScreen() function, which will eventually be replaced by requestFullscreen(). Google's zmb.io Chrome Experiment shows how this functionality works.

The Chrome 28 for Android beta also ships with experimental support for WebGL as an about:flags option. This means web developers can now start using it in concert with Web Audio and WebRTC to create interactive web applications that also work on mobile devices.

Chrome 28 on the desktop introduces Rich Notifications that allow the browser to invoke OS-level notifications, currently on Windows and Chrome OS; Mac OS X and Linux support is expected to follow later. Since the notifications use the operating system specific notification technologies, messages from web sites are styled exactly like messages from native applications.

Chrome 28 Beta is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the browser's Beta release channel. The Android version can be downloaded from Google Play. Chrome is proprietary software, built from Google's open source Chromium project.

(fab)