14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome 16 may not be available yet, except in the open-source Chromium flavor, but work is already underway on what's becoming the next Chrome, slated for wide release several weeks from now.
Chromium 16 only showed up this week, but there are already several new features coming from Chrome 15. Google developer Peter Beverloo has compiled the week's most interesting additions and new features, at least from a developer's point of view.
The feature that is going to be the most visible to users is a new UI for Chrome/Chromium errors. A popup overlay is being used for displaying the actual errors, similar to the way the downloads manager in Firefox 9 has been designed.
The idea is to make error notifications less annoying, by not getting in the way of what the user wants to do, provided, of course, that the error itself is not preventing further action.
More details on the error can then be found in the wrench menu, to which the notifications are attached to initially.
It's not all about Google Chrome 16 though, the JavaScript Full Screen API has been enabled by default in Chrome 15. Support for the feature was already there, but developers only now believed it was stable enough to be enabled for everyone.
As expected, the revamped new tab page is still getting fixes. In a recent update, drag and drop support has been added to the bookmarks section.
Enterprise Chrome users, which aren't that many, can now define a white and a black list of sites to be accessed with the browser.
Google has been working on multiple-profile support for quite a while now, but it's not yet ready to support the feature widely. Multiple profile support has been disabled on Windows in Chrome 15.
Another interesting change this week, the forced close times for Chrome have been changed. Chrome will crash itself and shut down 20 minutes the shut down command is issued, for the beta version, 10 minutes in dev and 45 seconds for the Canary builds.
