Support for Device Orientation Coming to Google Chrome

Google wants everything to be online. It’s been fighting the traditional desktop app model for years and its efforts are beginning to bear fruit. There is a clear trend towards moving everything online and the web itself is becoming more suited to running powerful apps. But all of this relies very heavily on the browsers, which is why Google is putting so much effort into Chrome. The most recent piece of the puzzle is orientation support in Chrome, a feature Google has started to work on.

A patch to bring orientation support to Chromium and eventually Chrome has been introduced to the WebKit code. This would enable the browser to get orientation data from the device it is running on, things like rotation, acceleration and related data. The functionality is being built straight into WebKit, the rendering engine powering Chrome but also Safari and countless other mobile or desktop browsers.

For now, things are very much in the early stages, but development moves fast at Google so the feature may end up in Chrome surprisingly soon. Orientation data is heavily used on mobile devices and developers have learned to take advantage of the feature to build additional functionality to their apps.

Some apps, like games, are entirely built around orientation and acceleration data and this becomes the primary input from the user. With browsers starting to look more like web app platforms than anything else, it’s easy to understand why you’d want this sort of capabilities built in.

Mozilla has been working on something similar for almost a year now. And since Google is building this into WebKit, other browsers may be able to take advantage of the feature. For Google, the drive is to have this feature in time for Chrome OS where it would have a much bigger impact. Web apps will be central to Chrome OS and games will be a big part of that.  [via Cnet]