Earlier today on the Google Chrome Releases Blog, Chrome 55 Beta for Android was announced.
The changelog is lengthy and technical as always, so we’ll just touch on a couple things here. But as we talked about here, Chrome OS 55 is bringing some really great performance and feature updates, so seeing any version of Chrome moving closer to 55 is considered a good thing around here.
A quicker look at the updates can be found here at the Chromium Blog. Still, the list is pretty technical and a bit tough to really nail down exactly what is going on. Feel free to take a look.
The Chromium Blog states clearly:
Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Mac, and Windows.
So, even though the announcement is for Android today, other platforms should soon follow suit.
Touch Events
Without getting overly technical, touch events and mouse events on websites can get tricky when going back and forth from mobile to desktop. Handling touch like a mouse pointer and mouse pointers like touch inputs make for laggy and unresponsive websites.
Chrome 55 will solve this with unified PointerEvents. Though we don’t fully understand the underpinnings, anything that makes scrolling smoother on the web is a welcome addition.
CSS Auto-Hyphenation
CSS Auto-Hyphenation will allow for better, more specifically formatted text boxes. You can see an example below of how Chrome 55 will handle overflowing text.
Persistent Web Storage
As we have already discussed, Chrome 55 will bring support for Web Bluetooth and Web VR. Sites utilizing these technologies will need to behave more and more like apps. With the ability for sites to keep persistent storage on your local machine, interactions can be more rich and feature full.
There are more features and changes listed on the Chrome Releases Blog and you can check them out right here. As development continues, we’ll keep up with all the new stuff as it progresses.
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