14 DAY TRIAL // With Chrome 29 now pushed to the stable channel, it was only a matter of time before Chrome 30, which spent the past six weeks or so in the dev channel, would be graduated to beta. Sooner than expected actually, the new Chrome beta is here.
There's no reason to get excited though, the new beta is even more feature poor than Chrome 29. In fact, there isn't a single notable new feature in Chrome 30 beta as far as regular desktop users are concerned, with the exception perhaps of reverse image search support.
There's a different story on Android though, the new Chrome 30 for Android comes with support for the hardware-accelerated graphics API WebGL as well as a couple of new APIs under the hood.
"This release introduces the device motion part of the Device Orientation API in Chrome for Android Beta. DeviceMotion events provide you information about device acceleration and rotation rates. Check out isthisanearthquake.com to see them in action," Google explained.
"The MediaSource API allows JavaScript to generate media streams for playback, which enables use cases such as adaptive streaming and time-shifting live streams," it added.
"It is now enabled by default in Chrome for Android running on Jellybean or higher. This API is especially useful for streaming to mobile devices, where connectivity is often constrained and unpredictable," it said.
It's a repeat of the Chrome 29 release which also brought two major web technologies to the mobile web, Web Audio API and WebRTC. It's clear that the Chrome team has been focused on getting these technologies ready for the mobile web and little else.
Still, desktop users aren't completely forgotten, certainly not developers. The new CHrome beta, again like the previous Chrome 29, comes with some new APIs for Chrome apps making it possible to add in-app payments, create media galleries and so on.