14 DAY TRIAL // The Beta Google Chrome browser has now advanced to version 38 and the developers have made a number of important improvements that should be visible right away for the users.
The first release in the Google Chrome 38 Beta branch has been made and the devs are working on quite a few changes and improvements. Most of the Google Chrome updates don't have big modifications that can be seen right away, but latest release is a different matter.
The developers have explained that the user switching feature has been redesigned and it will make changing profiles and into the incognito mode a lot simple. They have also added a new experimental Guest mode, a new experimental UI for Chrome supervised users has been implemented, and numerous under-the-hood changes have been made for stability and performance.
"This release adds support for the new <picture> element thanks to the hard work of community contributor Yoav Weiss, who was able to dedicate his time to implementing this feature in multiple rendering engines because of a successful crowd-funding campaign that raised more than 50% of its funding goal."
"The <picture> element takes the concept of responsive design, previously solved by sending duplicate resources to the client, and bakes an elegant solution right into the web platform. It allows developers to list multiple versions of images that may be appropriate for the browser to display based on screen size, pixel density, or other factors," is also noted in the related Chromium announcement.
According to the devs, the Network Information ("NetInfo") API has been enabled, a new screen Orientation API allowing developers not only to detect whether a device is in portrait or landscape mode, but also to lock the screen orientation while a user is within that app, has been added, the CSS value 'image-rendering: pixelated' is now supported (scaled images appear to be composed of very large pixels), and the Encoding API enables the encoding and decoding of data from binary streams.
The Google Chrome developers only provide two kinds of binary files, deb and rpm, and no source. If you are not using a Linux distribution capable of reading this type of files, you will have to wait until it hits your repositories.
It's possible that the current generation of Google Chrome will not work properly on websites that have Java elements, but that cannot be avoided.
As usual, a complete list of changes can be found on the official website.
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