14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome moves at a blistering pace so it's hard to keep up with all of the updates, that is, unless you are patient enough to wait for them to land in the beta or stable channels. Even then, Google only highlights the big new features.
Luckily, Google Chrome, or rather Chromium, is open source, so most development happens in the open, all you have to do is dig it up.
Which is what developer Peter Beverloo is doing, providing a weekly update on Chrome/Chromium developments.
One of the big new features this week is support for the Web Audio API, a very promising tool for all developers interested in sound editing and generation within the browser.
The API was already available for Mac OS builds, but it's now working on Windows and Linux alike. It's still hidden behind a flag, you have to run Chromium with "--enable-webaudio" if you don't see the option in about:flags, and you can test it in a recent Chrome Canary build as well.
Web developers should also appreciate all of the work done on Web Inspector, which has received several improvements. There is now the option of de-obfuscating code, which should make it easier to read certain portions of a web page's source code. You can also redo/undo actions in the text editor.
While the Chrome UI is as minimal as they get, it's still seeing some improvements and tweaks. The latest is a new set of icons for the default themes, which lose some of their blueish hints in favor of a shade of gray which goes better with the color around them. These icons will land along with Chrome 12.
There are plenty of other updates, enhancements and improvements in the latest Chromium builds, you can check out a thorough list in the blog post linked to above.